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SCIENCE FICTION-
Vol. 12 No. 8 (Whole Number 133)
August1988
Next issue on sale
July 26, 1988
Novella
144 Waiting for the Olympians Frederik Pohl
Novelettes
38 Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance_ Howard Waldrop
82 El Vilvoy de las Islas Avram Davidson
Short Stories
18 The Great Martian Railroad Race_Eric Vinicoff
70 Them And Us Judith Moffett
72 Evening Shadow Stephen Leigh
108 The Grandfather Problem Andrew Weiner
112 The Color Winter Steven Popkes
124 Retrovision Robert Frazier
135 Flatline Walter Jon Williams
Columns
4 Editorial; Acrophobia Isaac Asimov
8 2nd Annual Readers' Award Results
10 Letters
16 Gaming Matthew J. Costello
184 On Books Baird Searles
192 The SF Conventional Calendar_Erwin S. Strauss
Poerm by Bmce Boston
Cover art for "The Great Martian Railroad Race" by Gary Freeman
Isaac Asimov: Editorial Director Gardner Dozois: Editor
Sheila Williams: Managing Editor
Joel Davis: President William F. Battista: Publisher
Published 13 times a year by Davis Publications, inc. at $2.00 per copy ($2.50 per
copy in Canada). Annual subscription of thirteen issues $25.97 in the United States
and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $30.67, payable in advance in U.S. funds.
Address for subscriptions and all other correspondence about them, P.O. Box 1933,
Marion, OH 43305. If you have questions regarding your subscription call
(614) 383-3141. Address for all editorial matters; Davis Publicaticxis, Inc., 380 Lex-
ington Avenue, NY, NY 10017. Isaac Asimov's lienee Fiction Magazine® is the
registered trademark of Davis Publications, Inc. © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc.,
3^ Lexington Ave.. New York, NY 10017. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A.
Protection secured under the Univereal and Pan American Copyright Conventions.
Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content In any manner without express
permission is prohibited. All submissions must irrclude a self-addressed, stamped
envelope; the publisher assumes no reaDonsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Sec-
ond class postage paid at New York. NY, and at additional mailing offices. Ca-
nadian third class postage paid at Windsor. Ontario. POSTMASTER, serrd form 3579
to lAsfm, Box 1933. Marion OH 43306. In Canada return to 625 Monnrouth Rd.,
Windsor, Ontario N8Y3L1. ISSN 0162-2188. '
ED^ORIAI
ACROPHOBIA
by Isaac Asinnov
Just about everyone knows I
don’t use airplanes. I have been
told that, in the United States,
about ten percent of those who can
afford to take airplanes to go here
and there choose not to, but travel
(if they must) by ground transpor-
tation.
Some people find this odd and I
have frequently been asked by re-
porters why I don’t fly. I have tried
to give them every possible answer
but nothing helps. For instance, I
know that most of them think it is
a matter of cowardice, so I say,
"Because I’m afraid to.” But that
doesn’t satisfy them; it’s too easy.
I suppose they want me to squirm.
I got into a taxi once and asked
to be taken to the railroad station.
He said, "Not the airport?” (The
airport is farther off and would net
the driver more money.)
"No,” I said, "the railroad sta-
tion.”
"What’s the matter?” said the
driver, a keen philosopher like
most taxi drivers, "You a coward?”
"How can you say I’m a coward,”
I demanded, "when I just volun-
tarily got into a New York taxi.”
For some reason, that angered him.
Some reporters say, "Isn’t it
strange that someone like you. Dr.
Asimov, who writes stories in which
you travel throughout the galaxy
won’t take airplanes?”
To which I have two answers:
1) "I write mystery stories, too,
and I have never shot anyone.”
2) "After traveling all over the
galaxy, what’s the excitement in
flying all over this piddling little
planet?”
Actually, though, I have severe
acrophobia (that is, a morbid fear
of heights — which is a very com-
mon affliction). I didn’t know I had
this condition until I was nineteen
years old. In that year, I took a
young lady to the New York World’s
Fair of 1939. I was very much
taken with this young lady and I
suggested we go on the roller
coaster. I did this for a nefarious
reason. I thought that when it
swooped down, the young lady
would be rendered helpless with
terror and she would be unable to
resist the burning kisses I intended
to shower on her face.
It didn’t work that way. We got
up to the top of the first climb, went
over it and dropped down in free
fall, and that’s when I discovered
I was a severe acrophobe. I screamed
4
steadily for the entire ride, and
crawled out of the car at last, far
more dead than alive. The young
lady had sat, calm and untouched
by any untoward emotion,
throughout the drive.
I presume that my acrophobia
plays some role in my reluctance
to take an airplane, but not much.
After all, the late, great editor
John W. Campbell, Jr., was also an
acrophobe and when he stayed in
a hotel, he always insisted on a
room no higher than the third floor.
I, however, will take a room on any
floor, and I live in an apartment on
the thirty-third floor. I admit that
I don’t like to go out on the balcon-
ies or to lean out the windows and
look straight down.
I think that a stronger influence
on my dislike of flying is a rather
more general dislike I have. I hate
to travel. I like the comfort of my
own bed, my own kitchen, my own
bathroom, my own apartment, my
own city. When I am forced to go
off on a trip, I do my level best to
make it as short as possible both
in space and in time and I am al-
ways delighted to come home again.
This, too, offends people, who
constantly hymn the joys of travel
into my ear. I don’t know why this
is. I have never in my life tried to
argue anyone into not traveling. I
am perfectly willing to let people
travel if they feel like it, but they
are not willing to let me not travel
if I feel like it.
A couple I know, for instance, are
always traveling, and have been
all over the world, sampling the
ISAAC ASIMOV:
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Serrior Vice President
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Please do not send us your manuscript
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EDITORIAL: ACROPHOBIA
5
joys of dysentery in dozens of dif-
ferent places. They were also great
tennis buffs until he destroyed his
back and she her hip. They always
lecture me on my refusal to travel
and to play tennis. The fact that
my digestion is perfect and my
skeleton is all in one piece does not
seem to cut any ice.
And now a psychologist has writ-
ten an article entitled "From
'Nightfall’ to Dawn: Asimov as Ac-
rophobe.”
Apparently, he is of the opinion
that my acrophobia enters into my
fiction and explains a lot.
He got this idea first as a result
of The Robots of Dawn in which my
hero, Elijah Baley, is terrified of an
airplane ride. However, this was
not the effect of acrophobia but of
agoraphobia (the morbid fear of
open places). I make a big fuss in
all the Elijah Baley books concern-
ing his agoraphobia because he has
lived all his life in an underground
city.
This is a reflection of the fact
that Horace Gold, the editor who
persuaded me to write The Caves
of Steel, was a severe agoraphobe
and it struck me as something that
would be useful as a plot device.
From the fact that I describe
agoraphobic fears very realisti-
cally, the conclusion is that I must
suffer from agoraphobia. — Except
that I don’t. I’m not the least bit
afraid of open spaces.
I admit that I enjoy enclosed
places because I like the feeling of
privacy. Thus, the room in which
I do my typing has the blinds per-
petually drawn and I work under
artificial light even on the bright-
est of sunlit days. However, my
word processor is in my living room
in which the blinds are always up
and in which the sunlight floods in
unimpeded since we are on the top
floor and face Central Park with
exposures in three directions. And
I work just as well there as I do in
my enclosed room. And although
I love the canyons of New York, I
also walk freely in Central Park
(and no. I’ve never been mugged in
either place).
Again, in my story "The Martian
Way” I describe space walks. I have
my characters floating in space
(attached by tether to their ship)
and enjoying the sensation. I de-
scribed the euphoria very well and,
in fact, when, some fifteen years
later, space walks actually took
place, the euphoria was there as I
had described it.
Does that mean that I would love
to space walk? Not on your life.
Nothing could get me into a rocket
ship in the first place and even if
I were knocked out and placed on
one, nothing could get me to leave
it in space.
Or what about my story "Night-
fall.” In it the characters are ter-
ribly Eifraid of enclosed places. They
all have severe "claustrophobia”
(the precise opposite of agorapho-
bia). What’s more, I describe the
claustrophobic sensations accu-
rately.
Does that mean that I am myself
a claustrophobe? No. You simply
can’t have it both ways. The fact
6
ISAAC ASIMOV
that I like to work in an enclosed,
darkened room proves I’m not a
claustrophobe. In fact, about a year
ago or so I had a magnetic reso-
nance test (no, they didn’t find any-
thing untoward), and to run this
test I had to be placed in a cylin-
drical coffin. (That’s what it
amounted to.) It was just big enough
to hold me and they left me there
for an hour and a half. I was glad
when I got out because I had noth-
ing to do in the cylinder and was
bored silly, but I was not bothered
by the enclosure.
So let’s summarize. In my sto-
ries, I describe characters who are
variously acrophobes, agora-
phobes, and claustrophobes, and in
each case, I describe the subjective
sensations in detail and, appar-
ently, accurately. Yet I admit only
to acrophobia.
How is that possible? Well, I’m
not sure I can explain this to a psy-
chologist, but there’s something
called "imagination.” I have been
exercising it intensively for forty-
nine years and I’m pretty good at
it. I can’t explain how it works, but
I know I can describe the feelings
of an agoraphobe and a claustro-
phobe, without being one, just as
I can describe the world-city of
Trantor in considerable detail
without ever having seen it.
Oh, well, the psychologist’s the-
sis is that I write my stories to help
me deal with all my various neu-
roses. In other words, I simply
couldn’t endure those neuroses un-
less I defanged them by putting
them into stories.
He wrote to ask me questions
when he was preparing the article
and I told him quite frankly that
I was satisfied with my life and
that I didn’t use my writings as a
crutch.
I don’t think he believed me.
Psychologists are odd people,
though. Once they have worked out
a thesis, anything you say — yes,
no, maybe, I don’t know — can be
used by them to support the thesis.
That arises from the fact that some
aspects of psychology are not yet
sciences.
So I’ll make up a thesis. I’ll sug-
gest that psychologists are driven
by neuroses and that the only way
they can live with said neuroses is
to attempt to prove that other peo-
ple have them, too, only worse. I
am quite confident that anything
the psychologist says in an attempt
to refute this I can use to support
the thesis. #
MOVING? If you want your subscription to lAsfm to keep up
with you, send both your old address and your new one (and
the ZIP codes for both, please!) to our subscription depart-
ment: 60x1933, Marion OH 43306.
EDITORIAL; ACROPHOBIA
7
2ND ANNUAL
READERS’ AWARD RESULTS
standing: William F. Battista, Bob Eggleton, and Gardner Dozols; Seated: Lawrence
Watt-Evans, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sheila Williams (holding J.K. Potter’s award), Pat
Murphy, and J.J. Hunt.
Well, another year has come and gone, and, after heavy voting,
the winners ot Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine's Second
Annual Readers’ Award poll have been selected. These were your
choices, the stories you— the readers— liked best out of all the fiction
we published during 1987. The readers were the only judges for this
particular award — no juries, no experts — and, once again, it’s in-
triguing to compare resuits with the Hugo and Nebula ballots, as
well as with the readers' polis conducted by Locus and Science
Fiction Chronicle. At any rate, this year’s winners, and runners-up,
were;
Novella
1. MOTHER GODDESS OF THE WORLD, KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
2. Eye for Eye, Orson Scott Card
3. The Secret Sharer, Robert Silverberg
4. The Blind Geometer, Kim Staniey Robinson
5. Carthage City, Orson Scott Card
Novelette
1. RACHEL IN LOVE, PAT MURPHY
2. Yanqui Doodle, James Tiptree, Jr.
3. On the Border, Lucius Shepard
Winter's Tale, Connie Willis
The Moon and Michelangelo, Ian Watson
5. Dinosaurs, Walter Jon Williams
Short Story
1. WHY I LER HARRY’S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS,
LAWRENCE WAH-EVANS
2. To Hell With The Stars, Jack McDevitt
3. The Little Magic Shop, Bruce Sterling
4. Angel, Pat Cadigan
5. Silent Night, Ben Bova
Best Poem
1. THE FAMOUS HOSPITALITY OF DAO’I, J J. HUNT
2. The Gift, Joe W. Haldeman
3. Nazca Lines, Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier
4. Science Fiction, Jane Yolen
5. Curse of the Demon's Wife, Bruce Boston
(It should probably be noted here that Robert Frazier, our most
frequently-used poet, split a large number of first place votes
among the eleven different poems by him that we ran in the
magazine in 1987.)
Best Interior Artist
1. J.K. POTTER
2. Gary Freeman
3. Terry Lee
4. Janet Aulisio
5. Bob Walters
Best Cover Artist
1. BOBEGGLRON
2. J.K. Potter
Gary Freeman
Terry Lee
4. Hisaki Yasuda
5. Joe Bergeron
1 neglected to add a “Best Serialization” category to this year's
ballot— we only ran two serials in 1987, afterall— but there were so
many write-in votes tor one particular serialization, and so many
other voters who attached letters to their ballots chiding me for not
providing a place to vote for this particular work, that we’ve decid-
ed to add an additional award, a “Special Award,” by popular
acclaim, to:
I, ROBOT: THE MOVIE, HARLAN ELLISON
The awards were presented at a party at the United Nations Plaza
Hotel in New York City on April 23, 1987; Analog’s AnLab Awards
were also presented at this time, as were the 1987 Science Fiction
Gaming Awards. Five out of six of the lAsfm's winners were on hand
to accept their awards, in addition to dozens of other writers, editors,
agents, artists, and poets, as well as many representatives of the
gaming community. After the party, the party attendees practically
took over a local restaurant; a few hours later, the most hardy — or
perhaps the most foolhardy— retired to the bar of the Doral Park
Avenue hotel, where the merrymaking continued long into the night,
the last surviving Party Animal reportedly staggering off in the
direction of its room somewhere around 4 a.m.
Dear Mr. Asimov,
THE PENALTY
Reading SF has always provided
more than a casual distraction for
me. I find that the fanciful flights
of my favorite authors stimulate
many hours of contented reflec-
tions while providing me with an
ever broadening point of view. Your
monthly publication lAsfm, which
I share — both the magazine and
the subscription fee — with a friend,
has frequently delighted both of us
in the quality and diversity of its
stories, so much so, we decided to
renew our subscription. As you
know, this year’s subscription fee
included a collection of stories by
Mr. Asimov, offered as an added
inducement for renewal. It is my
firm opinion that any attempt to
entice people into monetary ex-
penditures should lead to a grat-
ifying experience for the buyer, or
future transactions will suffer no-
ticeably. Should you plan to insult
your readers next year with an-
other such "reward,” please let me
know so that I may cancel my sub-
scription.
Regretfully yours,
R. B. Dean
No insult is intended. I assure
you that no reward will be forced
on you. Just state on your subscrip-
tion renewal that you don’t want my
crummy collection. And if it is sent
10
to you by mistake, just throw it
away. The offer is meant only for
those readers who like a little some-
thing for nothing once in a while.
I am told there are such people.
—Isaac Asimov
Dear Dr. Asimov,
Your recent remark concerning
how the New Wave was unsuc-
cessful by its own standards be-
cause it failed to "wipe out the Old
Wave” caught my interest because
while I was doing research for an
anthology called The Best of the
New Wave (which was co-edited
with Martin H. Greenberg, and
which Jim Frenkel intended to
publish as a Blue Jay Book), I
found no statements by any "New
Wave” authors that they had any
such intention.
This is not to say that certain
authors might not have been hoisted
by their own petard during con-
vention appearances or personal
conversations or while writing for
fanzines — my research certainly
wasn’t that thorough, although I
did find a rather tantalizing re-
mark by Colin Wilson in his "Sci-
ence Fiction as Existentialism”
essay concerning the "Old Guards’ ”
reaction to a speech by Harlan El-
lison. Wilson, however, did not
elaborate.
In any case, considering the "New
LEHERS
Wave’s” debt to Bester, Cordwai-
ner Smith, the Kuttner/Moore teeim,
Budrys, Sturgeon, Knight, the early
satires of Pohl and Kombluth, cer-
tain works by Keyes and Sherred,
etc., not to mention its connection
to authors of high fantasy such as
Mervyn Peake, such a goal would
have been impossible to achieve.
I might point out here, however,
that Michael Moorcock’s purpose
in publishing the kind of fiction he
did in New Worlds, the pillar of the
New Wave, was not to wipe out the
Old Guard. Moorcock didn’t really
care one way or the other, he
merely wanted to find and publish
fiction that would present images
of the then-present and future in
new, interesting, and provocative
ways. Sometimes he succeeded.
Sometimes he didn’t. There was
never one hundred percent agree-
ment, which is, I suspect, the way
Michael liked it.
Basically the New Wave was ev-
olutionary, not revolutionary. 'Three
points may help to prove this. First,
Heinlein’s early fiction and the
Don A. Stuart stories made their
initial impact on the field because
of their then-innovative style as
much as their content. The same
may be said for Sturgeon, Brad-
bury, and anybody else you’d care
to add. Furthermore, while it’s bas-
ically true that authors such as
Clement and yourself made an im-
pact via their powers of logic, no-
body really would have given a
damn if they hadn’t possessed (and
still do) styles interesting and/or
pleasant to read. Also, the impact
of Dune and The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress on the field in the sixties
can hardly be underestimated.
Secondly, J.G. Ballard published
his first short story in 1956. Dick,
Ellison, and Silverberg were al-
ready making their marks as
professionals, but like Ballard, their
best work was still to come. Bunch,
Aldiss, Brunner, and a handful of
other writers who contributed im-
portant experimental writings ap-
peared soon afterward. Some
authors, such as Farmer, always
staked out the cutting edge, often
at great professional risk. And the
story Marty and I selected as the
most successful example of Fritz
Leiber’s far-out, with-it, rad, fab,
gear sixties’ style — "The Inner Cir-
cles” — ^was actually written in 1958,
entire weeks before the sixties
started. It was evidently purchased
but not published hy Esquire. Which
brings me to point three:
Although the New Wave was as
much influenced by (off-beat)
mainstream vsTiting as it was by
SF, its influence in the States has
been pretty much relegated to the
field. That’s because science fiction
(and fantasy, and horror, even "best-
seller” horror) is like a second read-
ing language, regardless of its level
of sophistication. It’s far easier for
the fifteen-year-old SF addict to
learn how to appreciate Dickens
and Fuentes than it is for the Up-
dike and Oates reader to learn how
to appreciate Lovecraft and Ze-
lazny.
I don’t mean for anyone to think
I’m making some kind of subjective
judgement about SF from this— it’s
just a fact of reader psychology. For
the last fifty years SF has built up
a complex vocabulary of conven-
tions, images, themes, whathave-
you. And while some authors such
as Niven and Poumelle have mas-
tered the fine art form of the SF
LEHERS
11
bestseller, I’d still wager most of
their readers regularly read SF.
It’s just that there are more of them
than there used to be, and one rea-
son why is because of the combined
efforts of the New and Old Waves.
Ah! Are there still doubters in
the audience? You are holding in
your hands the latest issue of As-
mov’s, named after and watched
over by an undisputed master of
the Old Wave, currently being ed-
ited by Gardner Dozois, histori-
cally one of the best Young Turks
of the New Wave period — and the
magazine publishes regularly,
though not exclusively, authors on
the current cutting edge — Shepard,
Rucker, Bishop, Fowler, Sterling,
Robinson, and a host of others and
a cast of thousands. This is as it
should be.
Not revolutionary, but evolu-
tionary. And I respectfully submit.
Dr. Asimov, that should Jim find
a publisher for The Best of the New
Wave, providing you with the op-
portunity to view my entire case
should you choose, you might find
yourself changing your own mind
about the degree of the movement’s
success.
Best,
Arthur Cover
Grenada Hills, CA
Everything is evolutionary in a
way. Copernicus kept Ptolemy’s cir-
cular orbits and epicycles. Einstein
kept Maxwell’s equations. However,
heliocentrism did totally eliminate
geocentrism, and relativity did to-
tally eliminate absolute space and
time. I suspect that the Young Turks
thought that the Old Wave would
sink without a trace, even if they
didn’t say so officially, but it didn’t.
Who knows? Maybe there will al-
ways be stories with beginnings,
middles, and ends, written in
straight English.
—Isaac Asimov
Dear Dr. Asimov,
I’ve just recently started reading
your mag — since coming to college.
Now I’m addicted. I look for the
magazine in the bookstore once a
week. I somehow have the feeling
that the more I look, the quicker
it will come.
Regarding the November 1987
issue, I loved every story. I found
one mistake in the I, Robot: The
Movie script. There was a Whiz
Comics #1 vol 1. It was published
under the name Flash Comics.
There are only twelve known cop-
ies in the world, and as of now they
are priceless. 'They have never been
sold.
I heard you speak at Vassar.
Loved it.
Sincerely,
Michael D. Lehman
Elmira, NY
Ah, but you should hear Harlan
speak. He’s completely different from
me, but also great. — Wait, that
sounds immodest. Let me rephrase
it. — He’s completely different from
me, but manages to be great, any-
way. — Hmm, that still sounds im-
modest. I guess that’s why other
people can be modest. They know
how.
—Isaac Asimov
Dear Dr. Asimov;
The real difference between de-
tectives and the rest of us is well
12
LEHERS
illustrated by Connie Willis’s
"Winter’s Tale.” As an undergrad-
uate English major I was once
given the odious task of writing a
research paper on "the second-best
bed.” I was surprised to find any
academic material on such a sub-
ject but there was actually quite a
bit of serious speculation and re-
search into why Will left his wife
that bed. I wrote my paper and col-
lected my A never realizing that I
had overlooked all those clues to
the real story. Thank goodness Ms.
Willis did not. That’s why she is an
author and I am a reader. Fantas-
tic! Keep publishing stories as good
as this and, I promise, I’ll keep
reading.
Sincerely,
Shelley Barber
Stuttgart, AZ
Yes, it’s called imagination. I
once wrote a story about Professor
Moriarty’s monograph, "Dynamics
of an Asteroid" ( as mentioned by
Conan Doyle who clearly knew
nothing about the subject). By the
time I was done, I had deduced
from the name alone the attempted
destruction of the Earth.
-—Isaac Asimov
Gentlemen:
How wonderful of you to give us
Harlan Ellison’s screenplay. And
how thoughtful to provide a glos-
sary at the end.
There is perhaps a small error in
the glossary. I believe you will find
that the Steadicam and its imita-
tors are not gyroscopically stabi-
lized at all. Gyroscopes would
produce surprising motions in re-
sponse to the operator’s forces.
MIDI
Pioneerins
^matter
Wiysks
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TfQvet
yMtKiOHiU*
^ Amazing
r Science Fact!,
A WwL!
▼ ioslh
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13
Steadicams are stabilized with
damped springs and counter-
weights.
Sincerely yours,
Richard Kimmel
Chicago, IL
If there’s anyone who knows less
about mechanical engineering than
Harlan does, it’s 1. So I’ll just say
you’re very likely right.
—Isaac Asimov
Dear Isaac, Gardner, Sheila,
and all:
Normally, I am a reserved per-
son. If something is amazingly great
to someone else I’ll say it was good,
or okay. If I really enjoy a book or
story I’ll say it was "decent” or
"worth reading.” But your seriali-
zation of 7, Robot: The Movie was
Fabulous! Thrilling! Enthralling!
All of those words that you see on
the blurbs of paperbacks apply!
I wanted to write after the first
installment, but I waited. It was
hard, waiting to tell you how much
fun it was to read a movie script,
something I’ve never done before.
Everything was so vivid, all the
sets and scenes and effects; WOW!
It’s just a completely different ex-
perience to read a script than it is
to read a book. Thanks for the op-
portunity.
And to Harlan: Got any more
unproduced scripts laying around,
gathering dust? Send ’em in!
And to Warner Bros.: You poor,
poor fools. Boy, did you lay an egg
by letting this one slip by.
I have only one complaint about
the last three issues in which the
serial appeared. In December, what
happened to "On Books”? At first
I thought I had overlooked it, then
I thought maybe you had moved it
somewhere, but a glance at the
contents told me that it was ac-
tually not there! eeeeek! A month
without "On Books”! It was like
eating toast without butter, mac-
aroni without cheese. But, if you
needed room for 7, Robot, then it’s
okay. Just don’t do it again!
I read somewhere, in an article
by some reviewer in one of the best
of the year anthologies, a state-
ment which got me to thinking. He
said that your name on the cover
of lAsfm was actually holding the
magazine back, keeping the aver-
age newsstand browser from think-
ing that he could find new, exciting
fiction in a magazine labeled Asi-
mov’s. What do you think? I like
the name on the magazine, and the
quality of fiction never drops or
stays old fashioned just because of
the names. All one has to do is read
one story to see that an old timer’s
name doesn’t mean old time sto-
ries. But maybe there is that initial
barrier keeping some people from
picking up Asimov’s because they
think they’ll find old pulp fiction.
Any comments?
Paul Strain
Danville, IL
Let’s reason it out. Let us suppose
that my name on the magazine does
indeed induce the thought "Old
time stuff. Forget it.” In that case,
my name on a novel ought to induce
non-reading on a huge scale. But
it doesn’t. My novels, whether pub-
lished this year, or thirty-five years
ago, sell well. Consequently, we
conclude that my name can’t hurt
the magazine.
— Isaac Asimov
14
LEHERS
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GAMING
At last yeeir’s big game conven-
tion an event occurred that left
everyone feeling pretty good. Now,
you must remember that the
professional game designer com-
munity can resemble, at times, a
gossipy tea party. It’s not an unu-
sual experience to be talking to one
designer complaining about an-
other designer’s work, and then
move over to hear a similar litany
from the person you were just
speaking about.
Like a lot of things in life, you
take it all with a grain of salt.
But when Mike Gray’s game For-
tress America won the award for
best contemporary historical game
there was a general sense of sat-
isfaction and pleasure that filled
the small auditorium.
Fortress is a smashing game.
Even though its theme of the Next
War, with third-world coalitions
invading the good old USA and the
much-ballyhooed Star Wars in
place, ready to defend the home-
land, is more futuristic than his-
torical, no one minded that
anomaly.
But, to most of the convention
attendees. Fortress America rep-
resented a victory of a different
kind. It was produced by Milton
Bradley, the same people who bring
us Candy Land and Twister. It was
the fourth game in their Game-
master series and, with its minia-
ture plastic hovercraft, infantry,
and particle beam weapons, it
showed what one of the big boys
could do when turned loose on a
strategy game for adults.
Both game players and profes-
sionals were glad that the game
won. And we looked forward to the
next game in the series.
Now, there is Shogun (Milton
Bradley Company, Springfield, MA
01101), the best game in the Game-
master series so far. It’s a rich, de-
tailed game — and the most complex
of the Gamemaster series. But the
actual gameplay flows smoothly.
The production values are on a par
with the previous entries, like For-
tress America and Axis and Allies.
It would be a great game to play
even if it weren’t so wonderful to
look at.
The game is set in sixteenth cen-
tury Japan. Beautiful, traditional
water-color illustrations of combat
decorate the board and playing
aids, all done in the delicate style
that belies the violence that must
have filled the grand clashes be-
tween warlords. As with all the
Gamemaster games. Shogun comes
with a host of plastic miniatures.
16
But this time designer Mike Gray
has added some delightful sur-
prises.
There are over a hundred plastic
military units, including Samurai,
Ashigaru Gunners, Ronin, Arch-
ers, and, an assassin for hire, the
Ninja. Each player also has a castle
to store his/her pieces and plan
his/her strategy for the next round.
For the first time, a Gamemaster
game uses cards — employed here
in a Risk-like fashion to allocate
territories and keep track of the
number of provinces a Warlord
controls. The cards are also used to
secretly record where a Warlord’s
hidden mercenary army of Ronin
might appear.
With an Occidental bow to the
Oriental concepts of fate and karma,
the game comes with five minia-
ture samurai swords. If no player
has bid for the right to the first
move (and attack) the swords are
hidden and each player draws one.
The swords carry anywhere from
one to five diamonds. The player
with the highest sword goes first.
As mentioned. Shogun is more
complex than the other Gamemas-
ter games. But in play, it is any-
thing but slow-moving.
Players start the game with three
armies, led by Daimyos. The Dai-
myos and their attendant samurai,
spearmen, and gunners, are kept
on a separate card off the board. A
single standard-bearer on the board
represents that army. Each player
receives koku, with one koku equal
to the amount of rice a soldier
needs to live for a year. Koku can
be used to purchase new units,
claim the "Sword” for first turn,
build a castle, hire Ronin (who can
be assigned secretly to a province),
or hire the Ninja.
After all the players have depos-
ited their koku in the appropriate
slots on their castle, everyone re-
veals their plans. The winning bid-
der gets the sword or the Ninja. In
case of a tie, no one gets that item.
Then the action begins. Each
Warlord moves his Daimyo’s arm-
ies, whose ability to move increases
as they grow in experience. Battles
are fought against adjacent armies
or occupied provinces. Ronin are
revealed, often turning the tide in
a close battle. The player control-
ing the Ninja can elect to attempt
an assassination of an opponent’s
Daimyo, or use the Ninja to spy on
the next round’s planning.
Shogun comes with an unprece-
dented 12 twelve-sided dice, and
you’ll need all of them. During a
battle, an army attacks in order
dependent on ability and range.
First bowmen and gunners fire,
and casualties are removed. Then
Daimyos, swordsmen, and others
attack. Each type of warrior has a
different "to-hit” number, with sa-
murai bowmen being the strong-
est. But an army is limited in the
number of samurai it can have, and
lowly spearmen can be important
in determining the outcome.
The object of the game is to be
the player who controls thirty-five
provinces (though the rules say
that a game could be played imtil
there is only one Warlord left). •
GAMING
17
TKS ensAT
MARTIAN
RAILROAD
RACE
by Eric Vinicoff
The author began writing professionally in
1975 and has since sold over forty stories to
science fiction magazines and anthologies.
Many of these stories, including “The Weigher”
which was nominated for the Hugo in 1984, were
co-written with Maroia Martin. Mr. Vinicoff is
presently at work on his first novel,
Malden Flight. “The Great
Martian Railroad Race” is his
first tale to appear in lAsfm.
art: ^ob Walters
"What this planet needs, Candice, is a railroad.”
Timothy Lo made the comment as he walked through the deboarding
tube toward the terminal. He made it to his personal assistant, a cry-
ogenic Danish beauty. They were alone in the tube, since the shuttle
captain had escorted them to the airlock ahead of the less important
passengers.
"You’ve certainly found the right setting for your venture,” she said.
"You won’t need your rose-colored glasses.”
His glasses were thick and clear. But the afternoon sky outside the
tube was a gently luminescent pink. A small bright sun sent rays skit-
tering across the rippling ice fields, glazing the metal of the port facilities.
They were still adjusting to the surreal experience of walking in the
.38 g when they reached the terminal. "Look sharp,” he told her. "The
curtain is going up.”
A reception committee was waiting in the almost-empty concourse.
Masa Kobiashi, the CEO of the North Polar Consortium, stood in front
of a row of vice-presidents. "Six VPs,” Timothy Lo whispered. "They
aren’t sure they want in, but they are taking me seriously.”
The Consortium contingent bowed in unison; he bowed back. Candice
had slipped into her role of minor functionary and non-person.
"Welcome to Mars, Mister Lo,” Masa Kobiashi said. "I trust your trip
was enjoyable?”
"Very much so, thank you.”
"I’ve arranged suitable quarters for you at the Residence. You’ve been
cleared through United Nations Customs, and your bags will be for-
warded. Shall we go?”
"By all means.”
Three limos were parked in front of the terminal, their open doors
suckled by entry tubes. A spacecap in a snug JSL red-and-white marssuit
was tending the tubes. Without the suit he would have been rather
uncomfortable. The air pressure was less than one percent of Earth sea
level, with very little oxygen, and the temperature was a balmy —115
degrees.
But the entry tubes were an extension of the friendly environment
senior execs preferred, and so were the stretched Toyota Ultimas with
their fat traction tires. Timothy Lo settled into a conforming seat in the
first limo, beside Candice and facing Masa Kobiashi.
"We can take the long way around,” the CEO said, "if you care to see
more of the Consortium.”
Timothy Lo smiled. The most important businessman in the solar
system didn’t offer to play tour guide idly. "I do indeed.”
Masa Kobiashi touched a button. "Take us out Radial Two,” he told
20 ERIC VINICOFF
the autocon, "then left on Circum Seven to the Consortium Administra-
tion Center. Residence, level six.”
As the limo pulled away from the curb, the flagship leading the fleet,
Timothy Lo took a comprehensive look at the port.
At first glance, it resembled the contents of a toy chest scattered across
the ice. Then the pattern and scale emerged. A ring of buildings, ship-
yards, and storage tanks enclosed dozens of cradles. Highways and pipe-
lines ran into the tundra, linking the port to the company complexes.
The spaceships were shiny silver globes, ra,nging from the passenger
shuttle that loomed over the JSL terminal to the really big cargo drones.
He was impressed. Wealth was his religion, and he liked his temples
grandiose.
Masa Kobiashi noticed his interest. "North Polar Port handles more
tonnage than any other facility on Earth or Mars. Raw materials from
the belt and Jupiter’s moons, manufactured goods to Earth, petrochem-
icals and organics from Earth, and supplies to the miners.”
"With the Consortium making a tidy profit on each leg,” Timothy Lo
observed. "Likewise EIP at the South Pole. I’m curious how Mars man-
aged to become the hub of space industry?”
"Well, for one thing, it’s closer to the mining activities than Earth
is — close being a relative term involving escape velocities as well as
distances. But the main reason is all around us. Look over there.”
The highway cut laser-straight through the uneven terrain; they were
sharing it with a lot of vehicles, mostly trucks. Off to the right a metal
globe at least fifteen meters in diameter was rolling across the ice. It
reminded Timothy Lo of a snowball, because it left a path of bare rock
behind it. 'There was a Komatsu logo on its side.
"A water collector,” Masa Kobiashi explained. "A robot drone, of
course — there are hundreds of them working the cap. Water to drink,
water for industrial use, oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen
for rocket fuel. More than we’ll ever need. That is why we’re here.”
Masa Kobiashi suggested drinks, and they gave their orders to the
bar. When they had glasses in their hands the CEO said, "You’ve come
a long way on an interesting errand. Mister Lo. But maybe an impossible
one.
"It’s eminently possible. You think so, too, or one of your VPs would
be making meaningless noises to me now.”
Masa Kobiashi frowned momentarily at the crudeness. "Your repu-
tation precedes you. You’ve been successful in the investment business
due to good judgment and, ah, creative techniques. Your current net
worth is in excess of two hundred million dollars. But you’ve never op-
erated a railroad.”
THE GREAT MARTIAN RAILROAD RACE
21
"My compliments to your espionage network. Speaking of which, isn’t
it safe for you to conduct business in your office?”
Masa Kobiashi decided to be amused rather than insulted. "You may
be right — one never knows for sure. Let’s return to the topic of railroad-
ing, shall we?”
"Let’s. I’ve never operated a railroad, but I’ve hired some people who
have.”
The limo curved left onto another highway, skirting an arched entrance
that read: FUJI CHEMICALS CORPORATION. Beyond the archway a
fantastic jungle of gleaming towers, tanks, pipes, and other shapes
seemed to grow out of the ice.
"I think you’ve underestimated the engineering challenges involved
in building your railroad,” Masa Kobiashi said.
"How so?”
"The straight-line distance from pole to pole is 10,700 kilometers. Your
route will have to be even longer, to avoid volcanoes, canyons, craters,
and dust lakes. You’ll have to lay track on permafrost. Then there are
the sand and dust storms, with winds up to two hundred KPH. Martian
dust is very fine. It gets into everything, and has an unfortunate effect
on moving parts.”
"Engineering problems can always be solved. That’s what engineers
are for.”
They passed another entrance: NISSAN CORPORATION. Long, low
buildings surrounded a terraced pyramid. "The car parts factory is fully
automated,” Masa Kobiashi explained. "The central structure is an ar-
cology for the administrative and maintenance personnel. What makes
you think we need a pole-to-pole railroad?”
"The North Polar Consortium consists of forty-six Japanese firms in
a wide range of industries. The European Industrial Park isn’t much
smaller. You could be doing a lot of mutually beneficial business, if it
weren’t for the high cost of shipping by cargo drone.”
"We did our own study of the potential trade. While substantial, it
wouldn’t justify the massive capital outlay needed to build such a rail-
road. How do you intend to make a profit, if I may ask?”
Timothy Lo smiled. "I’ve seen your study. All I can say is maybe you
looked at the venture too narrowly.”
"My compliments to your espionage network. So you hope to sell the
Consortium a share of this railroad?”
"No.”
"No?”
"It’s going to be my railroad,” Timothy Lo said firmly. "I’ve arranged
financing with a group of banks, but they need loan guarantees way
22 ERIC VINICOFF
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beyond my own holdings. I want the Consortium to be my cosignatory,
in exchange for very favorable terms in our shipping contracts.”
"The benefit you offer hardly matches the risk we would be taking. I
don’t see how I can recommend it to our members.”
Timothy Lo didn’t respond for several seconds, then spoke in a level
voice. "Iff go bust, you get the railroad.”
The Nippon Atomics entrance had a gate and a tall security fence. In
the distance nine ominous white hemispheres rose above the complex,
venting pale stream.
Masa Kobiashi was looking at him intently. The CEO thought that he
was a fool, destined to fail. But was he a capable enough fool to build the
railroad first? If so, the Consortium would acquire it at a bargain price.
"I think something can be arranged,” Masa Kobiashi said at last.
"When you’re settled and rested, would you be willing to explain your
venture in detail at a meeting with my department heads?”
"My pleasure.”
"There is something you should know. You aren’t the only person to
approach us about a pole-to-pole railroad. Shortly after I received your
prospectus, I was contacted by an Irish businessman named Michael
Killeen.”
Timothy Lo’s face went blank. "I’ve never heard of him.”
"His proposal was remarkably similar to yours.”
"Thanks for telling me — seems I have some housecleaning to do. May
I ask why you aren’t talking to him instead of me?”
"He has ties to EIP,” Masa Kobiashi replied. "He’s there now, probably
trying to negotiate a financial package.”
"I see. If there’s going to be a railroad, you don’t want to be at the short
end of it. Well, rest assured, there will be a railroad. Mine.”
The UNSA didn’t rate space in the United Nations compound; it had
been exiled to three floors of an unassuming downtown office block.
Timothy Lo sat in Director Obomi’s anteroom while that official showed
proper contempt for businessmen by making him wait. Beside him Cand-
ice was synopsizing reports in her hand computer.
"Mister Lo, the director will see you now.” The secretary gestured to
the inner door.
The office of Idi Obomi, Director of the United Nations Space Agency,
wasn’t very impressive even by bureaucratic standards. He rose from his
desk wearing a colorful Mali tribal robe and a phony smile. "Good after-
noon, Mister Lo.” They shook hands. "I’m sorry about the delay. Thanks
to the budget cuts everyone here is doing the work of three.”
"That’s quite all right. I appreciate you taking the time to see me.”
24
ERIC VINICOFF
They sat. "Your notion is very imaginative,” the director began. "But
I doubt this agency can authorize the territorial grant you’re seeking.”
"Why not? Legally it’s no different from the grants you made to the
Consortium and EIP.”
"The United Nations holds the solar system in trust for the benefit of
the human race, and the UNSA acts as trustee. The polar grants were
made to open Mars for exploration and exploitation.”
"That’s exactly why you need my railroad. Right now there are two
polar enclaves, your Lowell Research Station, and a lot of empty planet.
I’m sure you can see the potential in having rail access to 11,000 kilo-
meters of Mars.”
"If you were just asking for the right-of-way along your route, that
could be arranged. But why do you need alternating five kilometer
squares beside the right-of-way?”
"To make the venture financially viable. Some of it will be used for
stations and other railroad facilities, the rest will go on the market.”
"You expect the United Nations to give you 55,000 square kilometers
of land so you can turn around and sell it?”
"Right now nobody wants the land. Except at the poles nothing on
Mars is worth the cost of getting to it. When property values go up due
to my railroad, why shouldn’t I reap some of the benefit? Remember, the
other 55,000 square kilometers along the line will belong to you. You’ll
come out way ahead.”
Director Obomi developed a facial tic at the thought of more revenues
for the UNSA to spend, but he was still reluctant. "Your proposed grant
is bigger than both polar grants combined. It would be very hard to
justify to the Secretary General, particularly after the media got hold
of it.”
Timothy Lo shook his head. "I share your vision of humanity’s destiny
in space. It saddens me to see that vision treated so shabbily.”
"What do you mean?”
"You do wonders with limited resources, but you could do a lot more
if you received proper support in the General Assembly. Small minds
can’t see how important your work is. Well, my railroad is going to open
up a new frontier. Frontiers mean people. People pay taxes, vote, and
need public services. You’ll have to have a bigger budget, more staff,
and,” Timothy Lo’s eyes flicked around the austere surroundings, "a
suitable headquarters to handle your increased responsibilities.”
When Timothy Lo left a few minutes later, a sincerely smiling Director
Obomi walked him to the door. "I’ll call you when I have a better idea
where we stand.”
"Thanks. It has been a pleasure.”
THE GREAT MARTIAN RAILROAD RACE
25
There followed several weeks of planning, organizing, and very discreet
bribery. Finally the call came.
"Good news, I hope?” Timothy Lo asked.
"Yes and no,” Director Obomi said. "The United Nations Space Agency
is prepared to authorize your grant, in exchange for transportation serv-
ice to Lowell and any other facilities we establish.”
"What’s the bad news?”
"We’ve received a similar application from the Ulster-Mars Railroad
Company Ltd.”
"Owned and operated by one Michael Killeen?” Timothy Lo asked
through gritted teeth.
"I believe so. We’re required to treat both applications equally, so we’ve
borrowed a precedent from history. A railroad race.”
"A what?”
"Curiously, you both proposed the same route,” Director Obomi an-
swered. "The equipment will be standardized. You’ll start from the North
Polar Consortium, and Ulster-Mars will start from the European Indus-
trial Park. You’ll build your rail lines until you meet. The more kilo-
meters you cover, the more grant territory you get.”
Timothy Lo didn’t say anything for several seconds. "Who suggested
this piece of fiscal insanity?” he asked at last. "Mister Killeen? I don’t
even know the gentleman, but I’m beginning to dislike him intensely.”
"I’m sorry you’re taking such a negative attitude,” Director Obomi said
stiffly. "Please come to my office Thursday morning at ten for a full
briefing.”
The Adachi Company complex was a cluster of reinforced glassite
domes of a size possible thanks to the low Martian gravity. Hida Adachi’s
office occupied the top floor of the central dome, with a 360 degree view
of the floodlit complex. The night was crowded with stars, and Phobos
was rising in the west. Timothy Lo enjoyed the view while Hida Adachi
settled behind his desk/monitor station. The office was a reflection of the
Adachi Company; big, successful, and very high-tech.
"Welcome, Mister Lo,” Hida Adachi said. "I’m honored to meet you.
And fascinated, I might add. Your railroad is the most exciting project
here since the founding of the Consortium.”
"Thanks. It’s a unique opportunity.”
They chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, then Hida Adachi asked,
"Is there some way the Adachi Company can help in your great project?”
"As a matter of fact there is.” Timothy Lo slid a memory disk across
the brushed steel desktop to Hida Adachi. "The details of what I need
are in there. Shall I give you the general outline?”
"Please.”
26
ERIC VINICOFF
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"The Consortium doesn’t think a railroad can be cost effective, but its
calculations are based on building a lot of automated construction equip-
ment. There’s another way to go. Human labor. Thanks to the UNSA I
have to lay track as fast as I can, so I’m hiring a five thousand man work
gang.”
Hida Adachi was used to big numbers, but not of that sort. "How can
you possibly afford such a large work force?” he blurted out, his curiosity
overcoming politeness. "Employees are even more expensive than ma-
chines.”
"Not necessarily,” Timothy Lo replied. "I’ve arranged to import five
thousand Chinese peasants and their families. The Chinese government
was glad to cut a deal — the birth control program hasn’t been going well.
They will be shipped here in cold sleep.”
"But . . . why would they be willing to leave their home to come to this
inhospitable place?”
"For land. They’re farmers whose farms were taken over for govern-
ment collectives. I’ll be paying them in acreage instead of money.”
Hida Adachi laughed. "Forgive me, but the notion of peasant farmers
on Mars is hard to take seriously.”
"It shouldn’t be. You put a dome like this one over some land. Fill it
with air — oxygen from water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere. Run a line from a community reactor for heat and electricity.
Melt ice for water or pump it out of the ground. Grind rock, and add some
organics to make dirt. Stock it with plants and animals adapted to Mar-
tian conditions. You have a farm.”
Hida Adachi thought it over. "The technical problems are more in-
volved than you imagine, but not insurmountable. I’m sure we can build
your farms for you. By mass producing them we should be able to make
the price per unit very reasonable. But will you be able to afford five
thousand?”
"You misunderstand me,” Timothy Lo said. "I’m not in agribiz. You’ll
be selling them directly to the farmers, and running the power/water/air
distribution business.”
"That is absurd! They won’t have any assets. How will they pay?”
"On credit, to be repaid with interest from the proceeds of crop sales.
Food for the thirty-thousand-plus Consortium personnel around the solar
system, who must be getting pretty tired of flavored algae.” Timothy Lo
shuddered. "And industrial organics that the Consortium now has to
import from Earth or do without.”
"What recourse would we have if a farmer defaults on his loan?”
"The tenacity of the Chinese peasant farmer is legendary. The whole
family will work like slaves to keep their land. In the rare default, you
can dispossess them and sell the farm to someone else.”
28
ERIC VINICOFF
"That is a rather inhumane policy,” Hida Adachi commented.
"I’m a railroad builder, not a philanthropist. When you review the
complete package, you’ll find that the projected long-term profits are
very impressive.”
Hida Adachi didn’t seem impressed. "Even if we were interested in
such a speculative market, we would require substantial down pay-
ments.”
"I’m sorry to hear that,” Timothy Lo said. "I guess I’ll have to do
business with EIP.”
"I beg your pardon?” Hida Adachi leaned forward in his chair.
"Black Michael Killeen stole this idea from me along with the others.
He’s hiring five thousand Irishmen, Northern Protestants who aren’t
happy with the reunification. Verlagsgruppe will be building their farms,
and more customers would mean more profits. I suppose that explains
why Herr Zisser wants to meet with me.”
Hida Adachi frowned thoughtfully, then put on a smile. "It would be
unfortunate for our new neighbors to have to depend on goods and serv-
ices from so far away. Let me study your proposal. Would it be possible
to see you again in a few days, before you contact Herr Zisser?”
"Certainly.”
Timothy Lo peered through the cockpit bubble at the activity stretch-
ing across the rock-strewn plain. Four hours ago the ATV had left the
advance camp. At first the only human presence had been survey and
geology crews, but gradually the terrain had become busier.
"ETA three minutes, sir,” the autocon reported cheerfully.
The sausage-shaped ATV wove awkwardly through trucks and other
vehicles on the access road that paralleled the roadbed. Work crews in
color-coded marssuits swarmed everywhere. 'The access road was evolv-
ing from a raw path into the Pan Martian Highway. The roadbed was
being cleared, excavated, poured with gravel-like ballast, and graded.
"It seems very well organized,” Candice said.
"It had better be,” Timothy Lo replied. "I don’t like the reports I’m
getting fi-om down south. Black Michael’s gang is laying over thirty-five
kilometers of track a day.”
His eyes kept wandering to the exotic scenery. In the distance the
jagged rim of a broad crater dominated the plain. 'The pink sky was
turning sunset-red, and a wind kicked up swirls of dust.
"Here we are, sir,” the autocon reported.
Three portable domes had been inflated near the access road. The ATV
parked in an informal lot beside the "construction shack.” A sign over
the shack’s airlock read: NORTH MARTIAN RAILROAD COMPANY
CAMP NO. 38.
THE GREAT MARTIAN RAILROAD RACE
29
Two people were emerging from the airlock. Timothy Lo and Candice
put on their helmets, waited while the autocon evaced the cabin, then
climbed down to the frozen ground.
"It is good to see you again. Mister Lo,” the smaller of the two said on
his com channel. They shook hands.
Long ago he had realized that, while menials were interchangeable,
having the right people in key positions was essential. He had discovered
Doctor Seuki Nakano languishing in the Consortium’s engineering de-
partment, a victim of the traditional Japanese reluctance to promote
women. Now she was his Chief Engineer, doing the work of two for a
fraction of the salary of one, and grateful for the opportunity to prove
herself.
"Likewise,” he replied. "I want you to know I’m very happy with your
work. Don’t worry about this visit — Candice isn’t carrying my black hood
and ax in her purse. I’m just here to watch my railroad being built.”
Doctor Nakano had no sense of humor, but she laughed dutifully. "You
timed your arrival perfectly. There will be something well worth seeing
in a few minutes. Would you care to join me on my inspection turn?”
"By all means.”
They set out toward the roadbed, and Candice and Doctor Nakano’s
translator/bodyguard fell in behind them. Halfway there a piercing siren
came from Timothy Lo’s helmet speaker.
"Shift changes are sounded on all channels,” Doctor Nakano explained.
"We had better move aside to avoid being trampled.”
Floodlights on tall poles woke in unison, pushing back the gathering
darkness beyond the camp, access road, and roadbed. Work crews poured
out of the residence domes and trotted by in ranks. Timothy Lo switched
his com through a few work channels. The babble of orders and conver-
sations was in a variety of local dialects, many unintelligible to him,
plus a quickly developing pidgin.
Soon the relieved work crews jogged past heading for the domes. "How
are the workers holding up?” he asked Doctor Nakano.
"Amazingly well. I thought we would have serious labor trouble over
the twelve-hour shift schedule, but they seem to have accepted it.”
"You would understand why if you knew more about the working hours
of a peasant farmer. They want to finish the job as fast as they can, so
they can get their families out of cold storage and start farming.”
Doctor Nakano made sure they were on the private channel. "The
UNSA observers have been complaining about the opium and prostitutes.
They want us to stop providing them.”
"The job will be done long before the UN can pass a law. Meanwhile
we get a contented work gang.”
They stopped at the edge of the construction area and watched. 'Two
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tanker trucks were crawling side-by-side on the roadbed, spraying a
liquid into the ballast.
"The sealant creates rigidity with sufficient give to resist seismic
shock,” Doctor Nakano explained. "It also insulates the track base from
the permafrost. The only good thing I can say about permafrost as a
platform is that it is marginally superior to dust.”
A knot of frantic activity was approaching along the roadbed from the
north, becoming clearer as it got closer. Flatbed trucks carrying prefab
track sections were pulling off to the side of the access road. As each one
stopped, a work crew materialized and manhandled the section into po-
sition, a feat that would have required cranes on Earth. The foreman
ran around and gestured wildly. Everything was happening in an eerie
silence.
The sections reminded Timothy Lo of his model train sets. A hase of
beams and ties was anchored in the ballast, and the two elevated guide-
ways sat on rows of supports. Each guideway was a rounded alloy strip
two meters wide and a half meter thick.
"In six weeks Hitachi will be delivering the first cars,” he said. "I can’t
wait to see one of my trains gliding along that ribbon at three hundred
KPH.”
"It will be a beautiful sight.”
Workers began bolting the sections together. Engineers moved along
the track, making electrical connections and using lasers to align the
guideway sections.
The trucks and tools and hundreds of workers never slowed. They were
a colony creature, constantly fed, excreting track. North Martian was
busy along 1700 kilometers of the line, but this was the focus.
Timothy Lo watched raptly as his railroad raced south.
"I’m glad to see you’re all enjoying yourselves,” Timothy Lo said, his
voice amplified by the podium. "The next time you drop by, the drinks
and tickets won’t be on me.”
Consortium execs, UN officials, celebrities, media reps, and potential
customers jammed the new North Martian passenger terminal adjoining
JSL’s. The loud cocktail party babble subsided as they turned to listen.
"Don’t worry — I’m saving my speech for the ceremony. But I do want
to say a few words. Really just one word. Thanks. Thanks to everyone
who helped build the North Martian Railroad.”
His audience applauded. He smiled broadly and looked over their
heads, through the tall windows. There had been some recent additions
to the port; the North Martian headquarters buildings, the yard and the
sidings to the port facilities.
"There’s one more thing I want to say. ALL ABOOOARRRD!”
32
ERIC VINICOFF
North Martian conductors in sharp black uniforms began ushering the
passengers through the row of entry tubes.
Except for its flat nose the Deimos Express was a standard maglev
train, a descendant of the original Transrapid 06 design that the Japa-
nese had bought from the Germans. The cars were gleaming aluminum
and glassite. Below them, sideways-on, U-shaped skirts wrapped around
the edges of the guideway.
Candice had gracefully collected Director Obomi, Masa Kobiashi, and
the rest of his special guests. "Director, ladies, and gentlemen,” he said,
"we’re going to have the best seats on the train. This way, please.”
His private car was at the front end of the train. Like all of North
Martian’s passenger stock, it was a double-decker. The observation deck
was styled like an Orient Express parlour car. Stewards showed his
guests to their seats, while he settled into his and put on a throat mike.
"Welcome aboard the historic inaugural run of the Deimos Express,”
he said, and his voice rang throughout the train. "True, we’ve been
operating on the northern part of the line for several months. But this
will be the first train to travel from pole to pole.” Unless Ulster-Mars’
Sidhe Express arrives here first, he didn’t add.
A feminine pseudovoice interrupted him. "The Deimos Express is now
departing North Polar Port Station.”
There was a barely perceptible moment of rising, then the train pulled
out of the station. It accelerated smoothly, silently, and without vibra-
tion. The guideway banked for curves, offsetting the centrifugal force.
"Unlike the usual maglev system,” he continued, "we’re suspended
above the track by magnetic attraction instead of repulsion. The magnets
on the lower U-skirt arms are pulled up close to the ferromagnetic ar-
mature rails on the underside of the track. More magnets in the bend
of each U keep the cars in lateral position. Traction and braking are by
linear motor, reacting with a long stator in the track. The power comes
from nuclear generators at the stations.”
The train was rushing across an uneven ice field, gaining speed. 'The
Sony electronics complex appeared off to the right; it swelled and shrank
in seconds. The track passed over highways and other obstacles.
"Our freight trains are fully automated, and our passenger trains carry
only a service staff. Sensors in the cars and the track keep the computers
informed.” He sighed theatrically. "I always wanted to be a train engi-
neer. Now I own a whole railroad, but there aren’t any engineers or
engines anymore.”
The Consortium was quickly being left behind. The tundra blurred
close to the train, and the tenuous atmosphere whined faintly as it was
pushed aside.
THE GREAT MARTIAN RAILROAD RACE
33
"All of which is to say you’re traveling on the finest railroad ever built.
So relax and enjoy the ride.”
The stewards began serving drinks. Personal service was a throwback
to an earlier era, but North Martian had access to a vast pool of inex-
pensive labor.
Timothy Lo looked at his watch and smiled. He knew what was coming;
the reactions of his guests should be interesting.
What came was a northbound freight hauling meat and produce to the
Consortium. It hurtled toward them at a relative six hundred KPH. Only
at the last split-second did it seem to move aside, a flash of silver less
than three meters beyond the double panes.
. The reactions were interesting.
"There’s really no cause for alarm,” he reassured them as the stewards
cleaned up a few spills. "You traveled quite a bit faster on your flights
from Earth, and these trains can’t jump the track.”
The passengers divided their time between socializing, admiring the
scenery and enjoying the civilized comforts of the Deimos Express. The
dining/club cars did a brisk trade all evening. Eventually the passengers
retired to their sleeper compartments.
Sunrise found the train gliding through a dune field which reminded
Timothy Lo of Death Valley. Sand had been piled in wave patterns inside
cracked obsidian craters. Then came low, raw hills. A reddish-brown
plain. Volcanoes, some of them active. A trestle over a canyon cut by
ancient water. The face of Mars was an unending entertainment.
The train slowed going through the towns, so the passengers could get
a good look. They were all pretty much the same. A North Martian
station, a UNSA Civic Center, an Adachi Company plant and a mall
were surrounded by dozens of farm domes. Beyond them was a ring of
new construction. Trucks, bicycles, and brightly marssuited pedestrians
shared the streets.
"Most of the farmers are doing well,” Timothy Lo told the media reps.
"Immigrants are arriving in increasing numbers. Consortium members
are already selling to this growing market, and Earth’s consumer in-
dustries are establishing a beachhead. Banks are opening with capital
to invest. I foresee a grand future for this new frontier.”
He spent most of the trip tending to business. He consoled Director
Obomi over the myriad problems caused by the UNSA’s rapid expansion.
Masa Kobiashi raised the subject of certain mineral deposits which could
be profitably mined if North Martian would extend branch lines to them.
A hotel operator was interested in building tourist meccas at Olympus
Mons and the Equatorial Rift. All sorts of people were scenting a boom
and wanted in. He encouraged them.
Shortly after three p.m. the Deimos Express arrived at Promontory.
34
ERIC VINICOFF
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"Promontory,” Timothy Lo announced proudly, "is where the North
Martian and Ulster-Mars lines meet. It’s six hundred and forty-four
kilometers south of the equator. It’s also the only town without a Chinese
or Irish name.”
The train eased past the big North Martian station with its yard and
maintenance sheds, and stopped at the center of town. A portable dome
sat beside the tracks. Beyond it another train was parked on the north-
bound track, similar in design but wearing the Ulster-Mars logo.
It took awhile for the passengers to deboard through the front entry
tube, but soon they were mingling under the dome with those from the
Sidhe Express. When everyone was seated the ceremony began.
Timothy Lo sat on one side of the podium platform with North Mar-
tian’s officers; opposite them were Michael Killeen and his key people — all
of them Killeens. Ulster-Mars had the biggest family payroll on the
planet.
Director Obomi made a reasonably brief welcoming speech, then drew
his audience’s attention to where the two lines came together. They had
been linked and tested for weeks, but no train had yet crossed the in-
tangible beirrier. A North Martian and an Ulster-Mars worker stood on
the track base. At Director Obomi’s command one placed a superfluous
gold-plated spike and the other sledgehammered it home.
When the applause died down there were more speeches. Then every-
one drifted toward the bar and buffet, the chairs were removed, musicians
took the platform, and the first annual Golden Spike Gala got underway.
As soon as he could slip away without being noticed, Timothy Lo went
back to his private car. He sagged bonelessly in an observation deck seat,
smoking a rare festive cigar and watching a meteor streak across the
evening sky.
"A nice little train you have here. Mister Lo.”
He swiveled the seat, and saw Michael Killeen standing by the stair-
way.
For several moments they looked at each other without speaking. Then
Timothy Lo said, "Make yourself at home. Mister Killeen. The booze is
to your left.”
Michael Killeen poured himself a drink, and brought it over to the
seat across from Timothy Lo. "The Rail Society meetings have been duller
for your absence.”
"Alas, being seen together would be bad for our arch-enemies image.
Speaking of which ...”
"Put your mind at ease. No one saw me come, and no one will see me
go. Not that I’m really convinced we needed this fake race.”
Timothy Lo admired the glowing tip of his cigar. "You have a charming
innocence, old friend. Misdirection is the key ingredient in any great
36 ERIC VINICOFF
con. If the railroad could have been sold on its merits, it already would
have been. Whereas a fight over something tends to increase its perceived
value.”
"Innocence, my assets!” Michael Killeen grumbled. "At any rate some
self-congratulations are in order. Even if they figure out what we’re
doing, they can’t back out now. They have too many chips on the table.”
"We’re over the hump,” Timothy Lo agreed. "Now we have to nurture
the boom so it doesn’t go bust. Mars has the resources to support a
population of millions, and it’s going to. We’ll lay a lot of track, develop
a lot of land, and build our empires.”
He looked at the lights of the town. Tonight they were just a handful
huddled together in the middle of the empty darkness. But every night
would see a few more, spreading out a bit farther. "It’s like I said all
along. What this planet needed was a railroad.” #
THE GREAT MARTIAN RAILROAD RACE
37
DOYADOY4
mUHK DANCE?
by Howard Waldrop
art: Bob Walters
Howard Waldrop’s most recent collection
of short stories. All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past
(Ursus Books, 1987), has just been
nominated for The Horror Writers of America’s
Bram Stoker Award. Mr. Waldrop tells
us he is currently working on a
novel, I, John Mandeville, and on a
number of short stories and novelettes.
The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they
had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of
soap with rusty spoons.
"Frank! Frank!” the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before
they canceled it.
"No need to stand,” I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and
Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can,
no glass.
"How y’all?” I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted
a conversation.
"I feel like six pounds of monkey shit,” said Bob, who had once been
tall and thin and was now tall and fat.
"My mother’s at it again,” said Penny. Her nails looked like they had
been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a
snowbank.
"Jim went back to Angela,” said Barb.
I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music
over the speakers was "Wonderful World, Beautiful People” by Johnny
Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that
livelied us up.
"So,” said Barb, looking up at me, "I hear you’re going to be a tour
guide for the reunion.”
There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great
catastrophes just waiting to happen.
But the greatest one of all, the thing time’s been holding its breath
for, the capo de tutti capi of impending disasters, was going to happen
this coming weekend.
Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg
looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what
that switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.
The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school revmion.
And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high
school — it had been phased out in a magnet school program in ’74. 'The
building had been taken over by the community college.
The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary
education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.
Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building,
then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to
get stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what
used to be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.
That was the reunion Barb was talking about.
* * *
40
HOWARD WALDROP
"I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so exis-
tential that I offered to help out,” I said. "Olin Sweetwater called me a
couple of months ago — ”
"Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater!’’ said Penny. "Geez! I haven’t
heard that name in the whole damn twenty years.” She held onto the
table with both hands. "I think I’m having a drug flashback!”
"Yeah, Olin. Lives in Dallas now. Runs an insurance agency. He got
my name from somebody I built some bookcases for a couple of years ago.
Anyway, asked if I’d be one of the guides on the tour Saturday morn-
ing — ^you know, point out stuff to husbands and wives and kids, people
who weren’t there.”
I didn’t know if I should go on.
Bob was looking at me, waiting.
"Well, Olin got me in touch with Jamie Lee Johnson — Jamie Lee Some-
thing hyphen Something now, none of them Johnson. She’s the enter-
tainment chairman, in charge of the dance. I made a couple of tapes for
her.”
I don’t have much, but I do have a huge bunch of Original Oldies,
Greatest Hits albums and other garage sale wonders. Lots of people know
it and call me once or twice a year to make dance tapes for their parties.
"Oh, you’ll like this,” I said, waving to Carole to bring me another
Ballantine Ale. "She said 'Spring for some Maxell tapes, not the usual
four for eighty-nine cents kind I hear you buy at Revco.’ Where you think
she could have heard about that?”
"From me,” said Barb. "She called me a month ago, too.” She smiled
a little.
"Come on. Barb.” I said. "Spill it.”
"Well, I wanted to — ”
"I’m not going,” said Penny.
We all looked at her.
"Okay. Your protest has been noted and filed. Now start looking for
your granny dress and your walnut shell beads.” I said.
"Why should I go back?” said Penny. "High school was shit. None of
us had any fun there, we were all toads. Sure, things got a little exciting,
but you could have been on top of Mount Baldy in Colorado in the late
’60s and it would have been exciting. Why should I go see a bunch of
jerks making fools of themselves trying to recapture some, some image
of themselves another whole time and place?”
"Oh,” said Bob, readjusting his gimme hat, "You really should hang
around jerks more often.”
"And why’s that. Bob?” asked Penny, peeling the label from her Lone
Star.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
41
" ’Cause if you watch them long enough,” said Boh, "you’ll realize that
jerks are capable of anything."
Bob’s the kind of guy who holds people’s destinies in his hands and
they never realize it. When someone does something especially stupid
and life-threatening in traffic. Bob doesn’t honk his horn or scream or
shEike his fist.
He follows them. Either to where they’re going, or the city limits,
whichever comes first. If they go to work, or shopping, he makes his move
then. If they go to a residence, he jots down the make, model and license
plate of the car on a notepad he keeps on his dashboard, and comes back
later that night.
Bob has two stacks of bumper stickers in the glove compartment of his
truck. He takes one from each.
He goes to the vehicle of the person who has put his life personally in
jeopardy, and he slaps one of the stickers on the left front bumper and
one on the right reeir.
The one on the back says SPICS AND NIGGERS OUT OF THE U.S.!
The one he puts on the front reads KILL A COP TODAY!
He goes through about fifty pairs of stickers a year. He’s self-employed,
so he writes the printing costs off on his Schedule A as "Depreciation.”
Penny looked at Bob a little longer. "Okay. You’ve convinced me,” she
said. "Are you happy?”
"No,” said Bob, turning in his chair. "Tell us whatever it is that’ll
make us happy. Barb.”
"The guys are going to play.”
Just the guys. No names. No what guys'? We all knew. I had never
before in my life seen Bob’s jaw drop. Now I have.
The guys.
Craig Beausoliel. Morey Morkheim. Abram Cassuth. Andru Esposito.
Or, taking them in order of their various band names from junior high
on: Four Guys in a Dodge. Two Jews, A Wop, and A Frog. The Hurtz
Bros. (Pervo, Devo, Sado, and 'Twisto). The Bug-Eyed Weasels. Those
were when they were local, when they played Yud’s, the Vulcan Gas
Company, Tod’s Hi-Spot. Then they got a record label and went national
just after high school.
You knew them as Distressed Flag Sale.
That was the title of their first album (subtitled For Sale Cheap One
Country Inquire 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). You probably knew it as
the "blue-cake-with-the-white-stars-on-the-table-with-the-red-stripes-
HOWARD WALDROP
42
Not elementary at all—
but extraordinary fantasy
of a much higher order!
Esther M. Frieiaer
This delightfully inventive author's first
Signet fantasy, New 'SDrk by Knight,
introduced readers to a new hind
of fantasy novel. Elf Defense.
which followed, was equally fresh J
and original. Now with her latest
novel, she's at her best yet.
Dmid’s Blood, a seamless
mix of fantasy and history,
tabes readers through a a
vaj alternate 19 th- cen-
tury England, from the
haunts of Lord Byron and
Oscar Wilde to a confron- gl^ll
tation with all the darkest
magic a would-be mon-
arch's mad ambition
could conjure up.
formed-on-the-white-floor-by-the-blood-running-in-seven-rivulets-from-
the-dead-G.I.” album.
Tbeir second and last was NEXT! with tbe famous photo of the Saigon
police chief blowing the brains out of the suspected VC in the checked
shirt during the Tet Offensive of 1968, only over the general’s face they’d
substituted Nixon’s, and over the VC’s, Howdy Doody’s.
Then of course came the seclusion for six months, then the famous
concert/riot/bust in Miami in 1970 that put an end to the band pretty
much as a functioning human organization.
Morey Morkhein tried a comeback after his time in ihejusgado, in the
mid-70s, as Moe in Moe and the Meanies’ Suck My Buttons, but it wasn’t
a very good album and the times were already wrong.
"I can’t believe it,” said Penny. "None of them have played in what,
fifteen years? They probably’ll sound like shit.”
"Well, I’ll tell you what I know,” said Barb. "Jamie Lee — Younts-Ful-
ton is the name, Frank — said after his jail term and the try at the co-
meback, Morey threw it all over and moved down to Corpus where his
aunt was in the hotel business or something, and he opened a souvenir
shop, a whole bunch of ’em eventually, called Morey’s Mementoes. Got
pretty rich at it supposedly, though you can never tell, especially from
Jamie Lee — I mean, anyone, anyone who’d take as part of her second
married name a hyphenated name from her first husband that was later
convicted of mail fraud just because Younts is more sophisticated than
Johnson — Johnson Fulton sounds like an 1830 politician from Tennessee,
know what I mean? — ^you just can’t trust about things like who’s rich
and who’s not. Anyway, Morey was at some convention for seashell bro-
kers or something — Jamie says about half the shells and junk sold in
Corpus come from Japan and Taiwan — he ran into Andru, of all people,
who was in the freight business! Like, Morey had been getting shells
from this shipping company for ten years and it turns out to belong to
Andru’s uncle or brother-in-law or something! So they start writing to
each other, then somehow (maybe it was from Bridget, you remember
Bridget? from UT? Yeah.) she knew where Abram was, and about that
time the people putting all this reunion together got a hold of Andru. So
the only thing left to do was find Craig.”
She looked around. It was the longest I’d ever heard Barb talk in my
life.
"You know where he was?”
"No. Where?” we all three said.
"Ever eat any Dr. Healthy’s Nut-Crunch Bread?”
"A loaf a day,” said Bob, patting his stomach.
"Craig is Dr. Healthy.”
44
HOWARD WALDROP
"Shit!” said Bob. "Isn’t that stuff baked in Georgetown?”
"Yeah. He’s been like thirty miles away for fifteen years, baking bread
and sweet rolls. Jamie said, like some modern-day Cactus Jack Gamer,
he vowed never to go south of the San Gabriel River again.”
"But now he is?”
"Yep. Supposedly, Andru’s gonna fly down to Morey’s in Corpus this
week and they’re going to practice before they come up here. Abram
always was the quickest study and the only real musical genius, so he’ll
be okay.”
"That only leaves one question,” said Penny, speaking for us all. "Can
Craig still sing? Can Craig still play? I mean, look what happened after
the Miami thing.”
"Good question,” said Bob. "I suppose we’ll all find out in a big hurry
Saturday night. Besides,” he said, looking over at me, "we always got
your tapes.”
The name’s Frank Bledsoe. I’m pushing forty, which is exercise enough.
I do lots of odd stuff for a living — a little woodwork and carpentry,
mostly speakers and bookcases. I help people move a lot. In Austin, if
you have a pickup, you have friends for life.
What I mostly do is build flyrods. I make two kinds — a 7' one for a
#5 line and an 8'2" one for a #6 line. I get the fiberglass blanks from
a place in Ohio, and the components like cork grips, reel seats, guides,
tips and ferrules, from whoever’s having a sale around the country.
I sell a few to a fishing tackle store downtown. The seven-footer rejails
for $22, the other for $27.50. Each rod takes about three hours of work,
a day for the drying time on the varnish on the wraps. So you can see
my hourly rate isn’t too swell.
I live in a place about the size of your average bathroom in a real
person’s house. But it’s quiet, it’s on a cul-de-sac, and there’s a converted
horse stable out back I use for my workshop.
What keeps me in business is that people around the coimtry order a
few custom-made rods each year, for which I charge a little more.
Here’s a dichotomy: as flyfishing becomes more popular, my business
falls off.
That’s because, like everything else in these post-modernist times, the
Yups ruined it. As with every other recreation, they confuse the sport
with the equipment.
Flyfishing is growing with them because it’s a very status thing. When
the Yups found it, all they wanted to do was be seen on the rivers and
lakes with a six hundred-dollar split-bamboo rod, a pair of two hundred-
dollar waders, a hundred-dollar vest, shirts with a million zippers on
them, a seventy-five-dollar tweed hat, and a patch from a fl 5 rfishing
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
45
school that showed they’d paid one thousand dollars to learn how to put
out enough fly line to reach across the average K-Mart parking lot.
What I make is cheap fiberglass rods, not even boron or graphite. No
glamor. And the real fact is that in flyfishing, most fish are caught within
twenty feet of your boots. No glory there, either.
So the sport grows, and money comes in more and more slowly.
All this talk about the reunion has made me positively reflective. So
let me put 1969 in perspective for you.
Richard Milhous Nixon was in his first year in office. He’d inherited
all the good things from Lyndon Johnson — ^the social programs — and was
dismantling them, and going ahead with all the bad ones, like the War
in Nam. The Viet Cong and NVA were killing one hundred Americans
a week, and according to the Pentagon, we were killing two thousand
of them, regular as clockwork, as announced at the five p.m. press briefing
in Saigon every Friday. The draft call was fifty thousand a month.
The Beatles released Abbey Road late in the year. At the end of the
summer we graduated there was something called the Woodstock Fes-
tival of Peace and Music; in December there would be the disaster at the
Altamont racetrack (in which, if you saw the movie that came out the
next year, you could see a Hell’s Angel with a knife kill a black man
with a gun on camera while all around people were freaking out on bad
acid and Mick dagger, up there trying to sing, was saying "Brothers and
sisters, why are we fighting each other?”). On the nights of August 8 and
9 were the Tate-LaBianca murders in L.A. (Charles Manson had said to
his people "Kill everybody at Terry Melcher’s house,” not knowing Terry
had moved. Teiry Melcher was Doris Day’s son. Chuck thought Terry
owed him some money or had reneged on a recording deal or something.
When he realized what he’d done, he had them go out and kill some total
strangers to make the murders at the Tate household look like the work
of a kill-the-rich cult.) On December 17, Tiny Tim married Miss Vickie
on the Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson as best man.
The Weathermen, the Black Panthers and, according to agent’s reports,
"frizzy-haired women of a radical organization called NOW,” were dis-
turbing the increasingly senile sleep of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He
longed for the days when you could shoot criminals down in the streets
like dogs and have them buried in handcuffs, when all the issues were
clear-cut. Spirotis T. Agnew, the vice-president, was gearing up to make
his "nattering nabobs of negativism” speech, and to coin the term Silent
Majority. This was four years before he made the most moving and
eloquent speech in his, life, which went: "Nolo contendere.”
We were reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or rereading The
Hobbit for the zillionth time, or Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. And
46 HOWARD WALDROP
It’s A Conspiracy!
Illuminati Deluxe Edition is available at your favorite toy, hobby or
book store for $19.95. Or you can order it by mail. Just add $1.55 for
postage and handling. Texas residents please add $1.44 sales tax. Please
allow four weeks for delivery.
STEVE JACKSON GAMES
Box 1 S057-J Austin. TX VBVBO
Lasers, the Yuppies . .
No ploy is too devious,
way to world power.
The Fast Food Chains,
aided by their allies in
Hollywood, are trying to
take over the IRS! But the
IRS is already controlled
by the dreaded Bermuda
Triangle! And will the
UFOs and their minions,
the Phone Company, join
the struggle?
Headlines from a
grocery-store newspaper?
No . . . it’s a game of
Illuminati'.
This award-winning
game begins with one basic
premise. Secret conspira-
cies are everywhere! They
really are out to get
you . . .
Illuminati is all about
world conquest ... not by
guns and missiles, but by
stealth and guile.
Two to six players each
build a “power stucture”
of groups like the FBI, the
Post Office, the Nuclear
Power Companies, the
Orbital Mind Control
. the Yuppies? In Illuminati, anything can happen,
no stratagem too low, as the Illuminati scheme their
Illuminati and the all-seeing pyramid are registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games Incorporated.
on everybody’s lips were the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: That
which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nixon was working on that,
too.)
There were weeks when you thought nothing was ever going to change,
there was no wonderment anymore, just new horrors about the War,
government repression, drugs. (They were handing out life sentences for
the possession of a single joint in some places that year.)
Then, in three days, from three total strangers, you’d hear the Alaska
vacation — flannel shirt— last man killed by an active volcano story, all
the people swearing they’d heard the story from the kid in the flannel
shirt himself, and you’d say, yeah, the world is still magic . . .
I’ll really put 196,9 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing
a three-bedroom house that fall, and you’re splitting rent you think is
exorbitant, $89.75 a month. Minimum wage was $1.35 an hour, and none
of you even has any of that.
Somebody gets some money from somewhere, (jod knows, and you’re
all going to pile into the VW Microbus which is painted green, orange,
and fuchsia, and going to the H.E.B. to score some food. But first, since
there are usually hassles, you all decide to smoke all the grass in the
house, about three lids’ worth.
When you get to the store you split up to get food, and are to meet at
checkout lane Number Three in twenty minutes. An hour later you pool
the five shopping carts and here’s what you have:
Seven two-pound bags of lemon drops. Three bags of orange marsh-
mallow goobers. A Hostess Ding-Dong assortment pack. A twelve-pound
bag of Kokuho Rose New Variety Rice. A two-pound can of Beer-Nuts.
A fifty-foot length of black shoestring licorice. Three six-packs of Barq’s
Root Beer. 'Two quarts of fresh strawberries and a pint of Half and Half.
A Kellog’s Snak-Pak (heavy on the Frosted Flakes). A five-pound bag
of turbinado sugar. Two one-pound bags of Beizooka Joe bubble gum (with
double comics). A blue 75-watt light bulb.
It fills up three dubl/bags and the bill comes to $8.39, the last seventy-
four cents of which you pay the clerk in pennies.
Later, when somebody finally cooks, everybody yells, "Shit! Rice again?
Didn’t we just go to the grocery store?”
PS: On July 20 that year we landed on the Moon.
Now I’ll tell you about this year, 1989.
The Republicans are in the tenth month of their new Presidency, nat-
urally. After Cuomo and lacocca refused to run, the Democrats, like
always, ran two old war horses who quit thinking along about 1962. ("If
nominated, I refuse to run,” said lacocca, "if elected, I refuse to serve.
And that’s a promise.”)
48
HOWARD WALDROP
We have six thousand military advisors in Honduras and Costa Rica.
All those guys who went down to the post office and signed their Selective
Service postcards are beginning to look a little grey around the gills.
There are 1,800,000 cases of AIDS in America, and 120,000 have died
of it.
On Wall Street the Dow Jones just passed the 3000 mark after its near-
suicide in ’87. "Things are looking just great!” says the new president.
Congress is voting on the new two trillion dollar debt ceiling limit.
Things are much like they have been forever. The rich are richer, the
poor poorer, the middle class has no choices. The cities are taxing them
to death, the suburbs can’t hold them. Every state but those in the Bible-
belt South has horse and dog racing, a lottery, legalized pari-mutuel
Bingo and a state income tax, and they’re still going broke.
Everything is wrong everywhere. The only good thing I’ve noticed is
that MTV is off the air.
You go to the grocery store and get a pound of bananas, a six foot
electric extension cord, a can of powder scent air freshener, a tube of
store-brand toothpaste and a loaf of bread. It fits in the smallest plastic
sack they have and costs $7.82.
Let me put 1989 in another nutshell for you:
A friend of mine keeps his record albums (his CDs are elsewhere) in
what looks like a haphazard stack of orange crates in one comer of his
living room.
They’re not orange crates. What he did was get a sculptor friend of his
to make them. He got some lengths of stainless steel, welded and shaped
them to look like a haphazard stack of crates. Then with punches and
chisels and embossing tools the sculptor made the metal look like grained
unseasoned wood, and then painted them, labels and all, to look like
crates.
You can’t tell them from the real things, and my friend only paid three
thousand dollars for them.
Or to put it another way: And Zarathustra came down from the hills
unto the cities of men. And Zarathustra spake unto them, and what he
said to them was: "Yo!”
PS: Nobody’s been to the Moon in sixteen years.
MY TRIP TO THE POST OFFICE by FRANK BLEDSOE AGE 38
I’d finished three rods for a guy in Colorado the day before. I put the
clothes back on Fd worn working on them, all dotted with varnish. I was
building a bookcase, too, so I hit it a few licks with a block plane to get
my blood going in the early morning.
It was a nice crisp fall day, so I decided to ride my bike to the post
office substation to mail the rods. I was probably so covered with wood
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
49
shavings I looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been hit with a
slug from a .45.
I brushed myself off, put the rods in their cloth bags, put the bags in
the tubes with the packing paper, and put the tubes in the carrier I have
on the bike. Then I rode off to the branch post office.
I’m coming out of the substation with the postage and insurance re-
ceipts in my hand when I hear a lot of brakes squealing and horns
honking.
A lady in a white Volvo has managed to get past two One Way Do Not
Enter signs at the exit to the parking lot and is coming in against the
traffic, and all the angles of the diagonal parking places. She has a look
of calm imperturbability on her face.
Nobody’s looking for a car from her direction. As they back out, sud-
denly there she is in the rear-view mirror. They slam on their brakes
and honk and yell.
"Asshole!” yells a guy who’s killed his engine in a panic stop. She gets
to the entrance of the lot, does a 290 degree turn, and pulls into the
Reserved Handicapped spot at the front door, acing out the one-armed
guy with Disabled American Vets license plates who was waiting for the
guy who was illegally parked against the yellow curbing in the entrance
to move so he could get in.
She gets out of the car. She’s wearing a silk blouse, a set of June
Cleaver double-strand pearls and matching earrings, and a pair of those
shorts that make the wearer look like they have a refrigerator stuffed
down the back of them.
"Are you handicapped?” I ask.
She looks right through me. She’s taking a yellow Attempt to Deliver
slip out of her sharkskin purse. She has on shades.
"I said, are you handicapped? I don’t see a sticker on your car.”
"What business is it of yours?” she asks. "Besides, I’m only going to
he in there a minute.”
That’s what you think. She goes inside. I shrug at the one-armed guy.
With some people it was their own fault they went to Korea or Viet Nam
and got their legs and stuff blown off, with others it wasn’t.
He drives off down the packed lot. He probably won’t find a space for
a block.
I take my bike tools out of my pocket. I go to the Volvo. In deference
to Boh, I undo the valve cores on the left front and right rear tires.
Then I get on my bike and ride down to the pay phone at the bakery
three blocks away, call the non-emergency police number, and tell them
there’s a lady without a handicap sticker blocking the reserved spot at
the post office substation.
After mailing the rods and using the quarter for the phone, I have
50 HOWARD WALDROP
A Science Fiction
Book Club Selection
First time in pnperbock
$3.50 US
($4.50 Canada)
Merlin, son of the long-missing Prince Corwin, returns to
Amber to piece together the mystery of deadly intrigue
and murderous intent that has pursued him through ,
the shifting panoromo of shadow worlds. ^
Attempting to harness a magic force that
has gone out of control. Merlin must
confront at the Keep of Four Worlds
the person determined to
destroy him...
eft AVON BOOKS
The Hearst Corporofion
Violent vendettas...
renegade sorcery ...
whirlwind adventure...
ROGER
A
NEW
AMBER
NOVEL
Author of BLOOD OF AMBER
SIGN OF CHAOS
eighty-two cents lefi^-just enough for coffee at the bakery. It’s a chi-chi
place I usually never go to, but I haven’t had any coffee this morning
and I know they make a cup of Brazilian stuff that would bring Dwight
D. Eisenhower back to life.
I go in. They’ve got one of those European doorchimes that sets poor
people’s nerves on edge and lets those with a heavy wallet know they’re
in a place where they can really drop a chunk of money.
The clerk is Indian or Paki; he’s on the phone talking to someone. I
start tapping my change on the counter looking around. Maybe ten people
in the place. He hangs up and starts toward me.
"Large cuppa — ’’ I start to say.
The chime jingles and the smell hits me at the same time as their
voices; a mixture of Jovan Musk for Men and Sassoon styling mousse.
" — game.” says a voice. "How many croissants you still got?” says the
voice over my shoulder to the clerk.
The counterman has one hand on the coffee spigot and a sixteen ounce
styrofoam cup in the other.
"Oh, very many, I think,” he says to the voice behind me.
"Give us about — oh, what, John? — say, twenty-five assorted fruit-
filled, no lemon, okay?”
The clerk starts to put down the styrofoam cup. In ambiguous situa-
tions, people always move toward the voice that sounds most like money.
"My coffee?” I say.
The clerk looks back and forth like he’s just been dropped on the planet.
"Could you sort of hurry?” says the voice behind me. "We’re double-
parked.”
I turn around then. There are three of them in warmup outfits — gold
and green, blue and orange, blue and silver. They look maybe twenty-
five. Sure enough, there’s a blue Renault blocking three cars parked at
the laundromat next door. The handles of squash racquets stick up out
of the blue and orange, blue and silver, gold and green duffles in the
back seat.
"No lemon,” says the blond-haired guy on the left. "Make sure there’s
no lemon, huh?”
"You gonna fill our order?” asks the first guy, who looks like he was
raised in a meatloaf mold.
"No,” I say. "First he’s going to get my coffee, then he’ll get your order.”
They notice me for the first time then, suspicion dawning on them this
wasn’t covered in their Executive Assertiveness Training program.
The clerk is turning his head back and forth like a radar antenna.
"I thought they gave free coffee at the Salvation Army,” says the blond
guy, looking me up and down.
"Tres, tres amusant.” I said.
52
HOWARD WALDROP
"Are you going to fill our $35 order, or are you going to give him his
big fifty cent cup of coffee?” asked the first guy.
The ten other people in the place were all frozen in whatever attitude
they had been in when all this started. One woman actually had a donut
halfway to her mouth and was watching, her eyes growing wider.
"My big seventy-five cent order,” I said, letting the change clink on
the glass countertop. "Any time you come in any place,” I went on, "you
should look around the room and you should ask yourself, who’s the only,
only possible one here who could have taken Taiwanese mercenaries into
Laos in 1968? And you should act accordingly.”
"Who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the middle one, who hadn’t
spoken before and looked like he’d taken tai-kwon-do since he was four.
"Practically nobody,” I said. "But if any of you say one more word
before I get my coffee. I’m going out to the saddlebag on my bike, and
I’m going to take out a product backed by 132 years of Connecticut
Yankee know-how and fine American craftsmanship and I’m coming
back in here and showing you exactly how the rat chews the cheese.”
Then I gave them the Thousand Yard Stare, focusing on something
about a half mile past the left shoulder of the guy in the middle.
They backed up, jangling the doorbell, out onto the sidewalk, bumping
into a lady coming out with a load of wash.
"Crazy fuck,” I heard one of them say as he climbed into the car. The
tai-kwon-do guy kept looking at me as the driver cranked the car up. He
said something to him, jumped around the car and started kicking the
shit out of the back tire of the twelve-speed white Concord leaning against
the telephone pole out front.
I heard people sucking in their breaths in the bakery.
The guy kicked the bike three times, watching me, breaking out the
spokes in a half moon, laughing.
"My bike!” yelled a woman on one of the stools. "That’s my bike! You
assholes! Get their license number!” She ran outside.
I turned to the clerk, who had my cup of coffee ready. I plunked down
eighty cents in nickels, dimes and pennies, and put two cents in the TIPS
cup. Then I put saccharine and cream in the coffee.
Out on the sidewalk, the woman was screaming at the tai-kwon-do-
looking guy, and she was crying. His two friends were talking to him in
low voices and reaching for their billfolds. He looked like a little kid
who’d broken a window in a sandlot ball game. People had come out of
the grocery store across the street and were watching.
I got on my bike and rode to the comer unnoticed.
A cop car, lights flashing but with the siren off, turned toward the
bakery as I turned out onto the street.
It was only 9:15 a.m. It was looking to be a nice day.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
53
I got two-and-three-fourths stars in the 1977 Career Woman’s Guide
to Austin Men. Here’s the entry: Working-class bozo, well-read. Great for
a rainy Tuesday night when your regular feller is out of town. PS: You’ll
have to pick up all the tabs.
I’m still friends with about two-thirds of the women I’ve ever gone
with, which I’m as proud of as anything else in my life, I guess. I care
a lot. I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the
doormat personality.
At one time, in those days before herpes and AIDS, when everybody
was trying to figure out just who and what they were, I was sort of a
Last Station of the Way for women who, in Bob’s words, "were trying to
decide whether to go nelly or not.” They usually did anyway, more often
than not with another old girlfriend of mine.
(It all started when I was dating the ex-wife of the guy who was then
living with my ex-girlfriend. The lady who was then the ex-wife now
lives with a nice lady who used to be married to another friend of mine.
They each have tattoos on their left shoulders. One of them has a portrait
of Karl Marx and under it the words Hot to Trotsky.
The other has the Harley-Davidson symbol but instead of the usual
legend it says Born to Read Hegel.)
No one set out an agenda or anything for me to be their Last Guy on
Earth. It just happened, and expanded outward like ripples in a pond.
About two months ago at a party some young kid was listening to a
bunch of us old farts talk, and he asked me, "If the Sixties were so great,
and the Eighties suck so bad, then what happened in the Seventies?”
"Well,” I said. "Richard Nixon resigned, and then, and then . . . gee,
I don’t know.”
Another woman I dated for a while had only one goal in life: to plant
the red flag on the rubble of several prominent landmarks between Vir-
ginia and Maryland.
We used to be coming home from the dollar midnight flicks on campus
(Our Daily Bread, Sweet Movie, China Is Near) and we would pass this
neat old four-story hundred-year-old house, and every time, she would
look up at it and say "That’s where I’m going to live after the Revolution.”
I’m talking 1976 here, folks.
We’d gone out together five or six times, and we went back to her place
and were going to bed together for the first time. We were necking, and
she got up to go to the bathroom. "Get undressed,” she said.
54
HOWARD WALDROP
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When she came back in, taking her sweater off over her head, I was
naked in the bed with the sheets pulled up to my neck. I was wearing
a Mao Tse Tung mask.
It was wonderful.
Friday. Reunion Eve.
It was one of those days when everything is wrong. All the work I
started I messed up in some particularly stupid way. I started everything
over twice. I gave up at three p.m.
Things didn’t get any better. I tried TV. A blur of talking heads.
Nothing interested me for more than thirty seconds.
Outside the sun was setting past Mt. Bonnell and Lake Austin. Over
on Cat Mountain the red winks of the lights on the TV towers came on.
A Continental 737 went over, heading towards California’s golden climes.
I put on a music tape I’d made and tried to read a book. I got up and
turned the noise off. It was too Sixties. I’d hear enough of that tomorrow
night. No use setting myself up for a wallow in the good times and
peaking too early. I drank a beer that tasted like kerosene. It was going
to be a cool clear October night. I closed the windows and watched the
moon come up over Manor, Texas.
The book was Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel.
I tried to read it some more and it began to go yammer yammer yibble
yibble Twain, yammer yibble Hemingway. Enough.
I turned the music back on, put on the headphones and lay down on
the only rug in the house, looking up at the cracks in the plaster and
listening to the Moody Blues. What a loss of a day, but I was tired
anyway. I went to bed at nine p.m.
It was one of those nights when every change in the wind brings an
erection, when every time you close your eyes you see penises and vulvas,
a lot of them ones you haven’t seen before. After staring up at the ceiling
for an hour, I got up, got another beer, went into the living room and sat
naked in the dark.
I had one of those feelings like I hadn’t had in years. The kind your
aunt told you she’d had the day your grandfather died, before anybody
knew it yet. She told you at the funeral that three days before she’d felt
wrong and irritable all day and didn’t know why, until the phone rang
with the news. The kind of feeling Phil Collins gets on "In the Air
Tonight,’’ a mood that builds and builds with no discernible cause.
It was a feeling like in a Raymond Chandler novel, the kind he blames
on the Santa Ana winds, when all the dogs bark, when people get pissed
off for no reason, when yelling at someone you love is easier than going
on silently with the mood you have inside.
Only there were no howling dogs, no sound of fights from next door.
56 HOWARD WALDROP
Maybe it was just me. Maybe this reunion thing was getting to me more
than I wanted it to.
Maybe it was just hominess. I went to the VCR, an old Beta II, second
one they ever made, no scan, no timer, all metal, weighs 150 pounds,
bought at Big State Pawn for fifty bucks, sometimes works and sometimes
doesn’t. I put in Cum Shot Revue #I and settled back in my favorite easy
chair.
The TV going kskkssssssssss woke me up at 4:32 a.m. I turned every-
thing off. So this is what me and my whole generation come down to,
people sleeping naked in front of their TVs with empty beer cans in their
laps. It was too depressing to think about.
I made my way to bed, lay down, and had dreams. I don’t remember
anything about them, except that I didn’t like them.
I’ve known three women the latter part of the twentieth century has
driven slapdab crazy.
For one, it was through no fault of her own. Certain chemicals were
missing in her body. She broke up with me quietly after six months and
checked herself into the MHMR. That was the last time I saw her.
She evidently came back through town about three years ago, after she
quit taking her lithium. I got strange phone calls from old friends who
had seen her. Her vision, and that of the one we call reality, no longer
intersected. Having destroyed her present, she had begun to work on the
past and the future also.
Last I heard she had run off with a cook she met at a Halfway House;
they were rumored to be working Exxon barges together on the Missis-
sippi River.
The second, after affairs with five real jerks in a row in six months,
began to lose weight. She’d only been 111 pounds to begin with. People
whispered about leukemia, cancer, some wasting disease. Of course it
wasn’t — in the rest of the world, dying by not getting enough to eat is
a right, in America, it’s a privilege. She began to look like sticks held
together with a pair of kid’s blue-jeans and a shirt, with only two brightly-
glowing eyes watching you from the head to show she was still alive.
She was fainting a lot by then.
One day Bob, who had been her lover six years before, went over to
her house. (By then she was forgetting to do things like close and lock
the doors, or turn on the lights at night.)
Bob picked her up by her shirt collar (it was easy, she only weighed
eighty-three pounds by then) and slapped her, like in the movies, five
times as hard as he could.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
57
It was only on the fifth slap that her eyes came to life and filled with
fear.
"Stop it, Gabriella,” said Bob. "You’re killing yourself.” Then he kissed
her on her bloody, swelling lips, set her down blinking, and walked out
her door and her life, and hasn’t seen her since.
He saved her. She met another nice woman at the eating disorder
clinic. They now live in Westlake Hills, raising the other woman’s two
boys by her first marriage.
The third one’s cat ran away one morning. She went back upstairs,
wrote a long apologetic note to her mother, dialed 911 and told them
where she was, hung up and drank most of an eleven-ounce can of Crystal
Drano.
She lived on for six days in the hospital in a coma with no insides and
a raging 107° fever.
Her friends kept checking, but the cat never came back.
"Yo!” said Olin Sweetwater. He and two or three others were standing
outside the community college on the cool Saturday morning. He had on
a sweatshirt, done up in the old school colors, that said Bull Goose Tour
Guide. We shook hands (thumbs locked, sawing our arms back and forth).
He was balding; what hair he had left had a white plume across the left
side.
The two women, Angela Pardo and Rita Jones when I’d known them,
were nervous. Olin handed us sweatshirts that said Tour Guide. We
thanked him.
I looked at the brick facade. The school had been an ugly dump in
1969; it was still a dump, but with a charm all its own.
(One of the reasons Olin asked me to help with the tour is that I’d lived
with a lady artist for a year who had worked part-time as a clerk in the
admissions office of the community college. I guess he thought that qual-
ified me as an Expert.)
The tours were supposed to start at ten a.m. Sleepy college students
who had Saturday labs were wandering in and out of the two-and-a-half
story building or some of the other outbuildings the college leased. Olin
had pulled lots of strings to let us guide people without any interference,
or so he kept telling us.
Around 9:45 people started wandering up, trailing kids, shy husbands,
wives, lovers. God, I thought recognizing a few here and there. We’re so
fucking normal looking. We look like our mothers and fathers did in
1969.
(Remember in 1973 when you saw American Graffiti for the first time
and everybody laughed at the short haircuts and long skirts, then when
58 HOWARD WALDROP
you went back to see it in 1981 those parts didn’t seem so strange any-
more?)
I was talking to one of the few women who’d been nice to me in high
school, a quiet girl named Sharon, whose front teeth then had reminded
me, sweetly and not at all unpleasantly, of Rocket J. Squirrel’s. She was
now, I learned, on her second divorce. She introduced me to her
kids — Seth and Jason — who looked like they’d rather be on Mars than
here.
Sharon stopped talking and stared behind me. I saw other people turn-
ing and followed their gaze toward the street. "Jesus,” I said. A pink
flowered VW Beetle pulled up to the curb as a student drove away. Out
of it came something from Mr. Natural — the guy had hair down to his
butthole (a wig, it turned out), headband, walnut shell beads, elephant
bell pants with neon green flash panels, a khaki shirt and wool vest, Ben
Franklin specs tinted Vick’s Salve blue. There was a B-52 peace symbol
button big as a dinner plate on his left abdomen, and the vest had a
leather stash pocket at the bottom snaps.
Something in the way he moves . . .
Seth and Jason were pointing and laughing, other people were looking
embarrassed.
"Peace, Love, and Brotherhood,” he said, flashing us the pwace sign.
The voice. I knew it after twenty years. Hoyt Lawton.
Hoyt Lawton had been president of the fucking Key Club in 1969! He’d
worn three-piece suits to school even on the days when he didn’t have
to go eat with the Rotarians! His hair was never more than three-eighths
of an inch off his skull — we said he never got it cut, it just never grew.
He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he
made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was
a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America
was all about. Hoyt Lawton, what an asshole!
And yet, there he was, the only one with enough chutzpah to show up
like we were all supposed to feel. Okay, I’m older and more tolerant now.
Hoyt, you’re still an asshole, but with a little style.
By about 10:10 there were a hundred people there. Excluding hus-
bands, wives. Significant Others and kids, maybe sixty of the Class of
’69 had taken the trouble to show up.
Olin divided us up so we wouldn’t run into each other. I started my
group of twenty or so (Hoyt was in Olin’s group thank god) on the second
floor. We climbed the stairs.
"You’ll notice they have air conditioning now?” I said. 'There were
laughs. Austin hits ninety-five by April 20 most years. We’d sweltered
through Septembers and died in Mays here, to the hum of ineffectual
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
59
floor fans. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the ceiling fans might
as well have been heat pumps.
"How many of you spent most of the last semester here?” I said, point-
ing. Two or three held up their hands. "This used to be the principal’s
office; now it’s the copy center. Over there was Mr. Dix’s office itself.”
Lots of people laughed then, probably hadn’t thought of the carrot-headed
principal since graduation day. He’d had it bad enough before someone
heard him referred to as "Red” by the Superintendent of Schools one day.
"That used to be the only office that was air-conditioned, remember?
At least you could get cool while waiting to be yelled at.” I pointed to the
air-conditioning vents.
That there air duct I didn’t say is the one that Morey Morkheim got into
and took a big dump in one night after they’d expelled him one of those
times. Only in America is the penalty for skipping school expulsion for
three days.
Mr. Dix had yelled at him after the absence, "What are you going to
do with your life? You’ll never amount to anything without an education!”
In seven months Morey was pulling in more money in a weekend than
Dix would make in ten years — legally, too.
We moved through the halls, getting curious stares from students in
classrooms with closed glass doors.
"Down here was where the student newspaper office was. Over there
was the library, which the community college is using as a library.” We
went down to the first floor.
"Ah, the cafeteria!” It was now the study room, full of chairs and tables
and vending machines. "Remember tomato surprise! Remember maca-
roni and cheese!” "Fish lumps on Friday!” said someone.
Half the student body in those days had come from the parochial junior
highs around town. In 1969, parochial was the way you spelled Catholic.
Nobody in the school administration ever read a paper, evidently, so they
hadn’t learned that the Pope had done away with "going to hell on a
meat rap” back in 1964. So you still had fish lumps on Friday when we
were there. The only good thing about having all those Catholic kids
there was that we got to hear their jokes for the first time, like what’s
God’s phone number? ETcumspiri 220!
"Down there, way off to the left,” I said "was the band hall. You
remember Mr. Stoat?” There were groans. "I thought so. Only musician
I ever met who had absolutely no sense of rhythm.”
Ah, the band hall. Where one morning a bunch of guys locked them-
selves in just before graduation, wired the intercom up to broadcast all
over school, and played "Louie, Louie” on tubas, instead of the National
Anthem, during home room period. It was too close to the end of school
to expel them, so they didn’t let them come to the commencement ex-
60
HOWARD WALDROP
ercise. In protest of which, when they played "Pomp and Circumstance,”
about three hundred of us Did the Freddy down the aisles of the municipal
auditorium in our graduation gowns.
We passed a door leading to the boiler room, where all the teachers
popped in for a smoke between classes, it being forbidden for them to
take a puff anywhere on school grounds but in the Teachers’ Lounge
during their off-hour.
I stopped and opened it — sure enough, it was there, dimmed by twenty
years and several attempts to paint over it, but in the remains of
smudged-over day-glo orange paint on the top inside of the door it still
said: Ginny and Ray’s Motel.
Ginny Balducci and Ray Petro had come to school one morning ripped
on acid and had wandered down to the boiler room and had taken their
clothes off. My theory is that it was warm and nice and they wanted to
feel the totality of the sensuous space. The school’s theory, after they
were interrupted by Coach Smetters, was that they had been Fornicating
During Home Room Period, and without hall passes, too!
After Ginny came down, and while her father was screaming at Ray’s
parents across Dix’s desk, she said to her father, "Leave them alone.
They didn’t have their clothes off!”
"Young lady,” said Dix. "You don’t seem to realize what serious trouble
you’re in.”
"What are you going to do?” asked Ginny, looking the principal square
in the eye, "Castrate me?”
I answered some questions about the fire escape that used to be on the
south side of the building. '"They fell on a community college student one
day four years ago,” I said. "Good thing we never had to use them.” We
were outside again.
"Over there was the gym. World’s worst dance floor, second worst
basketball court. Enough sweat was spilled there over the years to float
the Big Mo. We can’t go in, though, they now use it to store visual aids
for the Parks and Rec department.”
There was the morning when Dix had us all go to the gym for Assembly.
His purpose, it went on to appear after he had talked for ten minutes,
was to try to explain why the Armed Forces recruiters would be there
on Career Day, along with the realtors and college reps and Rotarians
who would come to tell you about the wonders of their profession in the
Great Big World Out There. (Some nasty posters had appeared on every
bare inch of wall in the building that morning questioning not only their
presence on Career Day but also their continuing existence on the third
rock from the sun.)
He was going on about how they had been there, draft or no draft, war
or no war, every Career Day when a small sound started at the back of
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
61
the ranked bleachers. The sound of two stiffened index fingers drumming
slowly but very deliberately dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump. Then a
few other sets of fingers joined in dum-dum-thumb dum-dum-thump, at
first background, then rising, louder and more insistent, then feet took
it up, and it spread from section to section, while the teachers looked
around wildly Dum-Dum-Thump Dum-Dum-Thump.
Dix stopped in mid-sentence, mouth open, while the sound grew. He
saw half the student body — the other half was silent, or like the jocks
led by Hoyt Lawton, beginning to boo and hiss — rise to its feet clapping
its hands and stamping its feet in time —
BUM BUM THUMP BUM BUM THUMP
He yelled at people and pointed, then he quit and his shoulders sagged.
And on a hidden passed signal, everybody quit on the same beat and it
was deathly silent in the gym. Then everybody sat back down.
I think Bix had seen the future that morning — Kent State, the Cam-
bodian incursion, the cease fire, the end of Nixon, the fall of Saigon.
He dismissed us. The recruiters were there on Career Bay anyway.
I’d almost finished my tour. "One more place, not on the official stops,”
I said. I took them across the side street and down half a block.
"Ow wow!” said someone halfway there. "The Grindstone!”
We got there. It was a one-story place with real glass bricks across the
whole front that would cost $80 a pop these days. The place was full of
tools and cars.
"Oh, gee,” said the people.
"It’s now the Skill Shop,” I said. "Went out of business in 1974, bought
up by the city, leased by the community college.”
Ah, the Grindstone! A real old-fashioned cafe/soda fountain. You were
forbidden on pain of death to leave the school grounds except at lunch,
so three thousand people tried to get in every day between 11:30 and
12:30.
One noon the place was packed. There was the usual riot going on over
at UT ten blocks away. All morning you could hear sirens and dull
whoomps as the increasingly senile police commissioner, who had been
in office for thirty-four years, tried dealing with the increasingly complex
late twentieth century. Why, the children have gone mad he once said
in a 'TV interview.
Anyway, we were all stuffing our faces in the Grindstone when this
guy comes running in the front door and out the back at two-hundred
miles an hour. Somebody made the obvious stoned joke — "Man, I thought
he’d never leave!” — and then a patrol car slammed up to the curb, and
a cop jumped out. You could see his mind work.
62
HOWARD WALDROP
A. Rioter runs into the Grindstone. B. Grindstone is full of people.
Therefore: C. Grindstone is full of rioters.
He opened the door, fired a tear-gas grenade right at the lunch counter,
tinned, got in his car and drove away.
People were barfing and gagging all over the place. There were
screams, tears, rage. The Grindstone was closed for a week so they could
rent some industrial fans and air it out. The city refused to pick up the
tab. "The officer was in hot pursuit,” said the police commissioner, "and
acted within the confines of departmental guidelines.” Case closed.
"Ah, the Grindstone,” I said to the tour group. "What a nice place.” A
wave of nostalgia swept over me. "Today, shakes and fries. Tomorrow,
a lube job and tune-up.”
I was so filled with mono no aware that I skipped the picnic that
afternoon.
The Wolfskin Hotel! Scene of a thousand-and-one nights’ entertain-
ments and more senior proms than there are fire ants in all the fields
in Texas.
A friend of mine named Karen once said people were divided into two
classes: those who went to their senior proms and went on to live fairly
normal lives, and those who didn’t, who became perverts, mass murderers
or romance novelists.
If you were a guy you got maybe your first blow job after the prom,
or if a girl a quick boff in the back seat of some immemorial Dodge
convertible out at Lake Travis. The hotel meant excitement, adventure,
magic.
I hadn’t gone to my senior prom. A lot of us hadn’t, looking on it as
one more corrupt way to suck money from the working classes so that
orchids could die all over the vast American night.
There were some street singers outside the hotel, playing jug band
music without a jug — ^two guitars, a flute, tambourine and harmonica.
They were fairly quiet. The cops wouldn’t hassle them until after eleven
p.M. They were pretty good. I dropped a quarter into their cigar box.
You could hear the strains of the B5rrds’ "Turn! Turn! Turn!” before
you got through the lobby. The entertainment committee must have
dropped a ton o’ bucks on this — ^they had a bulletin board out front just
past the registration table with everybody’s pictures from the yearbook
blown up, six to a sheet.
It was weird seeing all those people’s names and faces — ^the beginnings
of mustaches and beards on the guys, we’d fought tooth and nail for facial
hair — long straight hair on the women — names that hadn’t been used,
or gone back to three or four times, in the last twenty years.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
63
I paid my $10.00 fee (like in the old days. Dance Tonight! Guys fifty
cents Girls Free!).
Inside the ballroom people were already dancing, maybe a hundred,
with that many more standing around talking and laughing in knots
and clumps, being polite to each other, sizing up what Time’s Heedless
Claws had done to each other’s bodies and outlooks.
Bob and Penny were already there. He was in a bluejean jacket and
pants and wore a clear plastic tie. Penny was stunning, in a green velour
thing, beautiful as she always is early in the evenings, before alcohol
turns her into a person I don’t know.
I was real spiffed out, for me: a nice sport coat, black slacks, a red silk
tie with painted roses wide as the racing stripe on a Corvette.
There were people there in $500 gowns, $300 suits, tuxes, jeans, cov-
eralls. Several were in period costumes; Hojft had on another, much
better than this morning’s nightmare, but still what I describe as Early
Neil Young. He was, of course, with a slim blonde who had once been
a Houston cheerleader. I’m sure.
I saw some faculty members there. They had all been invited, of course.
Ten or so, with their husbands or wives, had come. Even Mr. Stoat was
there. It hit me as I looked at them that most of them had been in their
twenties and thirties when they were trying to deal with us on a daily
basis, much younger than we were now. God, what a thankless job they
must have had — going off every day like going back up to the Front in
WWI, trying to teach kids who viewed you as The Enemy, following
along behind everything you did with the efficient erasers in their minds!
Maybe I’m getting too mellow — they had it easier with us than teachers
do now — at least most of us could read, and music was more important
than TV to us. Later, I told myself. I’ll go over and talk to Ms. Nugent
who was always my favorite and who had been a good teacher in spite
of the chaos around her.
There were two guys working the tapes and CDs up on the raised
stage. I didn’t recognize the order of the songs so knew they weren’t
playing one of my tapes. On the front part of the stage were a guitar and
bass, a drum set and keyboards.
So it was true, and seemed the main topic of conversation, although
as I passed one bunch of people I heard someone say "Those assholes?
'Them?”
Barb showed up, without a date, of course. She took my hand and led
me toward the dance floor. "Let’s dance until our shoulders bleed,” she
said.
"Yes, ma’am!” I said.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hypnotized on dance floors before.
64 HOWARD WALDROP
Sometimes it seems as if the tune stretches out to accommodate how long
and hard you want to dance, or think you can. The guys working the
decks were switching back and forth between two cassette players and
the music never stopped — occasionally songs only I could have recorded
showed up. I didn’t care. I was dancing.
(I’ve seen some strange things on dance floors in my life — the strangest
was people forming a conga line to a song by the band Reptilikus called
"After Today, You Got One Less Day To Live.”)
"Ginny’s here,” I said to Barb. Barb looked over toward the door where
Ginny Balducci’s wheelchair had rolled in. One weekend in 1973 Ginny
had gone off for a ski weekend with an intern, and had come back out
of the hospital six months later with a whole different life. "I’ll say hi
in a minute.” said Barb.
We danced to the only Dylan song you can dance to, "I Want You,”
"Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Sam and Dave,
slow tunes by Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, then Barb went over to talk
to Ginny. I was a sweating wreck by then, and the ugly feeling from the
night before was all gone.
I started for the whizzoir.
"You won’t like it,” said a guy coming out of the men’s room.
The smell hit me like a hammer. Someone had yelled New York into
one of the five washbasins. It was half full. It appeared the person had
lived exclusively for the last week on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Fighting
Cock Bourbon.
A janitor came in cursing as I was washing my hands.
I went back out to the ballroom. Mouse and the Trapps "Public Exe-
cution” was playing — someone who doesn’t dance recorded that. Then
came Jackie Wilson’s "Higher and Higher.”
"Dance with me?” asked someone behind me. I turned. It was Sharon.
She must have Gone Borneo that afternoon. She’d been somewhere where
they do things to you, wonderful things. She had on a blue dress and
seamed silk stockings, and now she had an Aunt Peg haircut.
"You bet your ass!” I said.
About halfway through the next dance, I suffered a real sense of loss.
I missed my butthole-length hair for the first time in ten years. The song,
of course, was "Hair” off the original Broadway cast recording, Diane
Keaton and all, and Joe Morton’s wife Patricia, who had never cut hers,
it grew within inches of the floor, suddenly grabbed it near her skull
with one hand and whipped it around and around her head, the ends
fanning out like a giant hand across the colored lights above the stage.
Joe continued his Avalon-ballroom-no-sweat dancing, oblivious to the
applause his wife was getting.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
65
Then they played the Fish Cheer and we all sang and danced along
with "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag.”
Then the lights came up and the entertainment director, Jamie Younts-
Fulton, came to the mike and treated us to twenty minutes of nostalgic
boredom and forced yoks. The tension was building.
"Now,” she said, "for those of you who don’t know, we’ve got them
together again for the first time in nineteen years, here they are, Craig
Beausoliel, Morey Morkheim, Abram Cassuth, and Andru Esposito, or,
as you know them. Distressed Flag Salel”
It was about what you’d expect — four guys in their late thirties in
various pieces of clothing stretching across twenty years of fashion
changes.
Morey’d put on weight and lost teeth, Andru had taken weight off.
Abram, who’d been the only one without facial hair in our day, now had
a full Jerry Garcia beard. Craig, who came out last, like always, and
plugged in while we applauded — all four or five hundred people in the
ballroom now — didn’t look like the same guy at all. He looked like a
businessman dressed up at Halloween to look like a rock singer.
He was a little unsteady on his feet. He was a little drunk.
"Enough of this Sixties crap!” he said. People applauded again. "To-
night, this first and last performance, we’re calling ourselves Lizard
Level!”
Then Abram hit the keyboard in the opening trill of "In-a-Gadda-da-
Vida” for emphasis, then they slammed into "Proud Mary,” Creedence’s
version, and the place became a blur of flying bodies, drumming feet,
swirling clothes. The band started a little raggedy, then got it slowly
together.
They launched into the Chambers Bros.’ "Time Has Come Today,”
always a show stopper, a hard song for everybody including the Chambers
Bros., if you ever saw them, and the place went really crazy, especially
in the slow-motion parts. Then they did one of their own tunes, "The
Moon’s Your Harsh Mistress, Buddy, Not Mine,” which I’d heard exactly
once in two decades.
We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn’t matter.
I saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet.
Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band’s trademark,
sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their
arms over their heads.
Then they started to do "Soul Kitchen.” Halfway through the opening,
Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.
"Awwwww,” we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.
Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey
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HOWARD WALDROP
pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and
Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.
"Hey! Make music!” yelled some jerk from the doorway.
Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. "Hold it right there, asshole,” he
said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second.
He leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. "You
stay right here, you’re going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever
heard!”
They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders,
looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.
Craig Beausoliel came back up front. "What we’re gonna do now, what
we’re gonna do now, gonna do,” he said in a Van Morrison post-Them
chant, "is we’re gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that
night in Miami . . .”
"Oh, geez,” said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and me.
Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up
like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian
Wilson and the Beach Boys while they were working on the never-fin-
ished Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we
heard through the grapevine) called either ATeu; Music for the AfterPeople
or A Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes
there, lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music.
We never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert
to raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when
somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one four a.m.
"It was a great song, man, a great song,” said Craig, "It was going to
change the world we thought.” We realized for the first time how drunk
Craig really was about then. "We were gonna play it that night, and the
world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and
we were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we’re not Dis-
tressed Flag Sale, we’re Lizard Level, and just once anyway, so you’ll all
know, tonight we’re gonna do 'Life Is Like That’.”
(What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The
Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking
for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale
made its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got
up to dance when the guys started playing "Life Is Like That” and Andru
took out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass
with it. The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted
heroin and amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted
them off to jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.
Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey
with possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE? 67
And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.
It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn’t
tell you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he’d torn his frenum on the
strings of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life
before the cops let a doctor in to see him.)
That’s the history of the song we were going to hear.
Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another Doors-
type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on the
guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air
over the stage, sort of like the opening of "Touch of Grey” by the Dead,
but not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began
to take on a shape and move on its on, like nothing else at all.
It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping
my right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I’d never
heard anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large
sways and swings; so did I.
The floor filled up fast. Everybody moved toward the music. Out of the
corner of my eye I saw old Mr. Stoat asking someone to dance. Other
teachers moved towards the sound.
Then I was too busy moving to notice much of an5d;hing. I was dancing,
dancing not with myself but with Sharon, with Bob and Penny, with
everyone.
All five hundred people danced. Ginny Balducci was at the comer of
the floor, making her chair move in small tight graceful circles. I smiled.
We all smiled.
The music got louder; not faster, but more insistent. The playing was
superb, immaculate. Lizard Level’s hands moved like they were a bar
band that had been playing together every night for twenty years. They
seemed oblivious to everything, too, eyes closed, feet shuffling.
Something was happening on the floor, people were moving in little
groups and circles, couples breaking off and shimmying down between
the lines of the others, in little waggling dance steps. It was happening
all over the place. Then I was doing it — like Sharon and I had choreo-
graphed every move. People were clapping their hands in time to the
music. It sounded like steamrollers were being thrown around in the
ballroom.
Above it the music kept building and building in an impossible spiral.
Now the hotel staff joined in, busboys clapping hands, maids and wait-
resses turning in circles.
Then the pattern of the dance changed, magically, instantly, it split
the room right down the middle, and we were in two long interlocking
linked chains of people, crossing through each other, one line moving up
the room, the other down it, like it was choreographed.
68
HOWARD WALDROP
And the guys kept playing, and more people were coming into the
ballroom. People in pajamas or naked from their rooms, the night man-
ager and the bellboys. And as they joined in and the lines got more
unwieldy, the two lines of people broke into four, and we began to move
toward the doors of the ballroom, clapping our hands, stomping, dancing,
making our own music, the same music, more people and more people.
At some point they walked away from the stage, joining us, left their
amps, acoustic now. Morey had a single drum and was beating it, you
could hear Andru and Craig on bass and guitar, Cassuth was still playing
the keyboard on the batteries, his speaker held under one arm.
The street musicians had come into the hotel and joined in, people
were picking up trash cans from the lobby, garbage cans from the streets,
honking the horns of their stopped cars in time to the beat of the music.
We were on the streets now. Windows in buildings opened, people
climbed down from second stories to join in. The whole city jumped in
time to the song, like in an old Fleischer cartoon; Betty Boop, Koko,
Bimbo, the buses, the buildings, the moon all swaying, the stars spinning
on their centers like pinwheels.
Chains of bodies formed on every street, each block. At a certain beat
they all broke and reformed into smaller ones that grew larger, inter-
locking helical ropes of dancers.
I was happy, happier than ever. We moved down one jumping chain
of people. I saw mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, dinosaurs, salamanders,
fish, insects, jellies in loops and swirls. Then came the beat and we were
in the other chain, moving up the street, lost in the music, up the line
of dancing people, beautiful fields, comets, nebulae, rockets and galaxies
of calm light.
I smiled into Sharon’s face, she smiled into mine.
Louder now the music, stronger, pulling at us like a wind. The cops
joined in the dance.
Up Congress Avenue the legislators and government workers in special
session came streaming out of their building like beautiful ants from a
shining mound.
Louder now and happier, stronger, dancing, clapping, singing.
We will find our children or they will find us, before the dance is over,
we can feel it. Or afterwards we will responsibly make more.
The chain broke again, and up the jumping streets we go, joyous now,
joy all over the place, twenty, thirty thousand people, more every second.
As we swirled and grew, we would sometimes pass someone who was
staring, not dancing, feet not moving; they would be crying in uncon-
trollable sobs and shakes, and occasionally committing suicide. #
DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?
69
THEM AND US:
Three Triplets
and Three Sonnets
by Judith Moffett
H. sapiens neanderthalensis (Them)
and (Us) Cro-Magnon, forking from the stem
of common human stock od hominem,
were equals; so with two enormous brains
and stone-age cultural parity, which genes
said we were fitter? What on earth explains
why sop/ens survived Prehistory
all, all alone, to assume a mastery
over the warming world? Dark mystery.
Whethertoo well adapted to the Ice
or simply overrun and out-competed.
Neanderthal — a people separated
from sapiens by rather more than race
yet altogether human — disappeared.
Faced with the fact, one falls back on the sonnet;
for twenty thousand years we shared a planet
with someone else! Much more may have been shared,
like languages. Like bodies; Leakey claims
some, on a close enough genetic course,
"might have been absorbed by interbreeding”—
and we the very caveman of our dreams,
the unknown Other come to spit his curse
of vengeance, or as bridegroom, to the wedding.
Some guess Neanderthal was more "humane”
(see William Golding’s novel)— peaceful souls
stamped out by wolfish sapiens like his own
nightmare, or grassfire conscience. That’s all balls.
Ourselves we know. Our next-of-living-kin
plan murder and are sometime cannibals
says Goodall. Count among the sons of Cain
also the underdog Neanderthals;
those scattered skeletons, base-battered skulls,
pelvis and rib with flint points driven in
and not by Us, and rough-cut human bone
charred for the feast, tell all. Stone chipping tools
helped small erectus break into the brain —
whose whelps we both were: dangerous animals.
At any rate we’re here and we’re alone,
smart as a whip and blinder than a bat.
Good sense made sapiens cooperate;
kindness was extra. Teaching apes to sign
beats talking to yourself, but what’s it prove?
The fairy tale is mightier than the truth,
opinion sprouts from feeling, or from faith,
our DNA impels us to sun/ive
by being avaricious letches, fleecing
competitors and founding dynasties,
same as iteverdid; now, overnight,
we’re meant to stop competing, stop increasing,
just ovemde these headstrong helices
three billion years went into getting right!
Parts of this poem a re excerpted from "The Missing Link," first pubiished in TheKenyon
Review— New Series, Spring 1982, Voi. 4, No. 2.Copyright cc)1982 by Kenyon Coiiege.
Reprinted with permission of the author and The Kenyon Renew.
p
m
EVENING i
SH>]DOM/^ ;
by Stephen Leigh
art: Nicholas Jainshigg
Stephen Leigh’s short pieces
have appeared in Wildecards,
Bantam Books’ shared world series,
and in various other outlets. His most
recent novels include The Bones of
God and The Crystal Memory. These
works were published respectively
in 1986 and 1987 by Avon Books.
The room was dark, soft with a wet noise like torn belldws: laboring
underwater.
There were two beds, each bearing an ancient, shriveled man. Elisa
almost turned and left, then. She steeled herself with a visible straight-
ening of shoulders that might have made her laugh, seeing it done by
someone else. She moved toward the window, which was shuttered
against a dull sunrise. A torn blind let in a wedge of dawn — it flared
against whitened hair, against the starched and uncomfortable-looking
pillow of the nearest man.
She’d not imagined that Tom would look this way. Her memory had
halted his aging, left him a permanent fifty-one. She hated seeing what
he’d become, the husk of her remembrance. It made her stomach sour.
He wasn’t asleep. His rheumy eyes stared blindly out, flecked with
moist reflections, laced with blood. A trail of spittle ran down one comer
of the slack mouth, the chest staggered up with slow breathing, the
exhalation loud with a congestion that made her want to clear her own
throat in sympathy. Elisa grimaced, her resolution wavering. Then she
leaned forward — thinking suddenly that the bed resembled nothing so
much as a large crib. Her movement stirred dead air: she caught a whiff
of stale urine and sour breath. She stood and retreated a step, hugging
herself.
"Tom?” she said. A whisper.
His head moved slightly. Dry hair rasped against cloth, but the eyes
showed no recognition, didn’t focus on her but on the window. He coughed.
More sputum ran down his chin.
Elisa felt the tears coming. She sniffed, willing them back. Her stomach
roiled with disgust. She half-turned, trying not to think, trying to avoid
looking at the man again, for she knew that if she did she would cry.
"I shouldn’t have come, Tom.” Her voice was harsh, growling. "I didn’t
want to remember you this way.”
"He seemed to recognize you there for a second.”
Startled, Elisa turned. An older black woman stared back — ^thin, spec-
tral in whites, her hair salted with gray, a tray balanced on one bony
hip. She glanced at Elisa appraisingly. "Granddaughter?”
Elisa smiled at that, tentatively. She nodded, accepting the lie — it
would do. "Yes. How is he?”
The woman set the tray down on a wooden stand between the two beds.
She didn’t look at either of the men. She wheezed slightly, as if the effort
of walking had tired her. "He’s old, girl. That’s all. He’s just waitin’ out
his time. One day I’ll come in here and he won’t be breathin’.” The
woman’s accent was a strange blend of midwestem blandness and south-
ern twang. She smoothed the whites over her flat chest; her gaze held
a faint challenge. "I seen his niece in here once, a year or more ago. She’s
the only one came. You think your parents might show up to see their
daddy, wouldn’t you?”
There was nothing Elisa could say to that — having accepted the role,
she couldn’t escape the accusation. His niece; that would be Agatha, in
her sixties now . . . "They . . . don’t live near here at all. Can’t get away
easily.” She knew that she lied badly. Even with the years of practice, it
still doesn’t come easily. You’d think I’d be more proficient at making up
these damn tales. Elisa’s gaze skittered around the room, glancing any-
where but at the nurse.
"They the ones send money?”
"Yes.” As always, one lie begat a string of others. Finding Tom had
74 STEPHEN LEIGH
been difficult, but once she’d had the address, she’d sent money — always
cash — once a month, whatever she could spare.
"Suppose they think it makes up for it. I guess this don’t ride easy on
their conscience.’’ Then her tone changed, became softer and less bitter.
"I’m sorry, honey. Workin’ here gets you cynical. I don’t mean to make
you feel bad. You came, at least. I can see you care about him.”
Elisa nodded. She attempted another smile, let it drift into a frown.
She glanced down at Tom’s empty, grizzled face, the eyes that stared at
nothing. When she looked at him, she couldn’t trust herself to speak. She
only wanted to leave this place and its oppressive still air. "Yes, I care,”
she said.
The woman watched her strangely, then busied herself with the tray,
arranging bottles needlessly. "Good. They need that, these ’uns. They
can’t say anything, most of the time, but I know they feel it. He’d thank
you if he could.” She paused and her voice was quickly warm, all reserve
gone. "Look, I got to feed him and change the sheets. You want to help?
I mean, it’s not to get out of the work myself, I just thought . . .”
He’s come full circle, being treated like a baby again . . . "No, I . . .”
Elisa shook her head and then laughed, a sound that was half sob. "Fine,
I’d like that.”
It wasn’t as bad as she thought it might be. The nurse was strong,
competent, and quick, fussing over Tom and talking to him and Elisa
the entire time. In the course of the monologue, Elisa learned that the
woman’s name was Louise Knott, that she’d been working at the Crest-
view Home ("There ain’t no view, and it ain’t much of a home”) for four
years, that Louise had three children. ("One boy in college, the other in
high school — he graduates this year — and my oldest girl married and
livin’ in Colorado. She’s ready to pop me a gran’child any day now.”)
Elisa helped her with the other man in Tom’s room ("You got to watch
him, honey. He’ll wake up a sudden and grab you, wantin’ a kiss”). Then
Louise let out a fervent sigh and clapped her hands together.
"Coffee time,” she said. "Want some?”
"I’d love it.”
"C’mon then.”
Louise led her to a lounge off the main hallway. A few plastic tables
sat in gaudy disarray before a smudged window overlooking an inner
courtyard. A dog-eared and filthy deck of cards sat in one comer of their
table. Louise poured coffee and brought back two Stsrrofoam cups. She
took her seat with a groan.
"How old’s your gran’pa?” the woman asked.
"Ninety-six,” Elisa answered.
"I hope it don’t bother you none to hear me say it, hut he ain’t gonna
EVENING SHADOW 75
be here much longer. He’s got it in his records he don’t want no extra
treatment; he’s here to stay, here to die. That’s the way he wanted it.”
"Does he ever talk?”
"Is that what you came for, hoping to talk to him?”
"I . . . there were things I wanted to tell him, yes.”
Louise shook her head. "He used to talk, a little. Not lately. And he
never did say much. I remember him saying that you should never trust
anyone. He was a bitter man, I think.”
"He had his reasons. He always brooded a lot, and you had to drag his
feelings out of him. I can imagine that he came to think that trust wasn’t
a safe feeling. I can understand that.”
Louise fiddled with the cards, turning them over one by one. Someone
had set them in order: Ace, King, Queen of Diamonds. "Fd’a thought he’d
been a good man to love, if you could get past his moods. Not easy,
though.”
"No, he wasn’t easy. God, I hate seeing him like this. He was so vital
once, so caring. I wish life hadn’t turned him so bitter. He never wanted
anything more than a normal life — that’s all anyone should want, huh?
I wish — ” Elisa found that she could say no more. She pressed her lips
together, grimacing.
Louise’s dark eyes glanced up from the cards. "That don’t sound like
no gran’daughter talkin’. Not the way you say it.”
Elisa tried to smile, wondering how the expression looked to the nurse.
"We were close once. A long time ago.”
"Can’t be that long ago for you, honey.” Louise leaned back, picking
up her cup again. The chair creaked against old linoleum, and her old,
chocolate eyes stared. "Sometimes the way you talk, the way you carry
yourself. I’d think you’re older, but you can’t be more’n twenty. 'Twenty-
five at the most. Now me. I’m old.” Louise grinned, laughing suddenly.
"I’ve been married forty years now.”
"It must be nice.”
"Heck, Sam’s an oT coot that lets me do what I want.” Again, the smile
and a sidewise roll of eyes. "But I love ’im.” She laughed.
Something in the woman’s voice, in her warm and open manner, dis-
armed Elisa’s caution, let her laugh along with her. Life had battered
Elisa, set her adrift, but Louise’s quick friendliness made Elisa want to
trust her, when she’d trusted no one for too long. Be careful. You’re
vulnerable. Be skeptical and distant. "It must be hard, living with the
same person that long.”
"Nothin’ to it. You just grow into each other, like two trees planted
side by side.”
"Don’t you ever find that he’s changed, that he’s not the same person
you thought he was?” Elisa scored the lip of her cup, a fingernail scraping
76 STEPHEN LEIGH
against the Styrofoam with a screech. She stared down at her hand,
intent. "Trees don’t always grow together. Sometimes one kills the other.
Sometimes they grow at different speeds.”
"You change, too. You get older, just like he does. Nobody stays the
same.”
Elisa said nothing to that. Outside the window, another nurse was
helping an elderly woman with a walker traverse the buckled asphalt
of a sidewalk. Silently, Elisa watched them make the long journey across
the courtyard. When she glanced back, Louise was staring at her again.
Elisa gave Louise the number of the motel at which she was staying.
For the next few days, she visited the nursing home every morning,
watching Tom for an hour or so, talking with Louise or one of the other
nurses there, and then going back to the motel to sit and watch the static-
infested TV. She had thought that she’d leave as soon as she’d seen Tom
again, but something held her. She wasn’t able to go, yet there was
nothing here for her. She’d walk to a bar, drink a few beers, and ignore
the overtures of the regulars. When she could feel the alcohol buzzing
in her head, she’d go back to her room and let herself fall into the oblivion
of sleep.
The shrill burring of the phone woke her. She tossed the covers aside,
wondering if she’d dreamed it, rubbing at one eye. The phone rang again.
Yawning, Elisa leaned over the bed and picked up the receiver.
"Hello?”
"Hi. I know how early it is, honey, but I didn’t have no choice. I knew
you’d want to be here.”
"Louise?”
"I’m sorry, Elisa. It’s Tom, your gran’pa. He’s havin’ lots of trouble. I
already called the doctor, but I thought you’d want to know.”
Elisa looked for a clock, realized that there were none in her shabby
room. "Thanks, Louise. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
"Make it quick, girl.” Then: "I’m really sorry, honey.”
"It was inevitable, wasn’t it? You said that Tom knew it’d be soon.
Don’t be sorry.”
"Don’t matter. I still am. And I don’t like being the one’s got to give
you the news. I have to go. See you soon.”
Elisa heard the phone click on the other end. She sat for a few minutes
with the phone on her lap, a tinny, distant recording imploring her to
please hang up. She waited for the grief to hit her, expecting that at any
moment the sadness would strike.
Nothing.
She felt nothing. The phone wailed in her lap.
* * *
EVENING SHADOW
77
When she arrived, Louise was waiting at the door. Together, they
walked the hall to Tom’s room. "The doctor got here a few minutes ago,”
she whispered to Elisa, as if afraid to speak any louder. "Come on. I’ll
take you in.”
A young man glanced up from the bedside. He straightened and glared
at Louise, ignoring Elisa. "This man should have been in a hospital
weeks ago. I’ve called the ambulance, but it won’t be here in time. I hope
that bothers you.” He swung around to face Elisa without waiting for a
reply. "You the relative?” His voice was gruff and weary.
"Yes.”
"Then you’d better say good-bye.” He snatched his stethoscope from
his neck, stuffed it into a Gladstone bag beside the bed and, yawning,
left. "I’ll be right outside,” he said as he brushed past Elisa. She stared
after him until Louise touched her arm.
Tom’s breath was a ragged stutter. The cheeks were hollowed, his skin
sallow. One hand, a withered, brittle claw, lay outside the sheet. Elisa
could see the rope of veins in it. He already looked dead, but the chest
still rose, slowly, irregularly. Elisa stared down at him. She felt Louise’s
presence behind her.
"Don’t mind the doctor,” the nurse said. "I’ll take care of him. Tom’s
requests were clear. He knew he was dyin’ and he didn’t want nothing
special done.”
Elisa nodded. She sat in a folding chair alongside the bed and took
Tom’s hand. His fingers were cold, and he didn’t return the pressure of
her touch. His eyes were closed, the lids flickering with restless move-
ment.
"Tom, get down from there. Please, love.”
Tom grinned at her from fifteen feet up in the branches of the oak.
Carelessly, he let himself swing from the limb on one hand. He dropped
several feet, grabbing another branch and then landing on the ground in
a rustling of leaves. He gave her a careless, showy bow. She could hardly
stay angry with him, not while he was standing there and smiling proudly
at her, like a kid showing off.
"You fret too much,” he’d told her. "We’re both too young to worry about
dying. You shouldn’t be so afraid.”
"Tom . . .” she began, then he laughed and grabbed her. Her protests
turned to passion as he pulled her down into the grass beside him.
Yet he had grown old, and cautious, and brittle. She’d waited to grow
old with him, but somehow had not. Who knew why? Some genetic ac-
cident, some chance combination of prenatal environmental factors?
Whatever the reason, she had not — did not — age. She’d stayed the same,
locked into an eternal twenty-one, while Tom and their friends aged and
78
STEPHEN LEIGH
changed. She’d watched Tom’s love become eroded by jealousy, bitterness,
and suspicion until, finally, she’d had to leave.
"I’m here again, Tom,” she said. "It’s me, Elisa.”
If he heard, he made no sign. He exhaled, thinly, with a rasping of
mucus. Seconds dragged by; with a start, Elisa realized that Tom hadn’t
taken in that next breath, that he was not ever going to. 'There was a
foul smell — his sphincter had relaxed.
Elisa bit her lower lip, shut her eyes. "Oh, damn. DamnP’ She moved
her hand away from his, hugging it to herself. So thafs the final ending
of age: slow, anticlimactic, and degrading. Elisa could hear the hush of
Louise’s steps as the nurse went to call in the doctor. The physician
leaned past Elisa with another yawn. He checked the carotid for a pulse,
listened for a heartbeat, pulled up one eyelid. He stood up. "In a hospital,
I might have been able to keep him alive.” He glared first at Elisa, then
at Louise, as if they were to blame for the death.
"To what purpose?” Elisa asked angrily. She felt only bitterness. Screw
you! she wanted to add. If s not my fault he got old. Nothing’s supposed
to last. Nothing and no one.
The doctor grimaced, looking as if he might retort, but he turned away
with a growl of disgust. "The arrangements have been made?” He
snapped shut the Gladstone. He was staring at Elisa again, the bag in
his hand, his coat over his arm.
"No,” Elisa said. "Well, I’m not sure . . . something . . .”
The look of irritation on the doctor’s face deepened. "Whatever it is.
I’m sure it’s what he would have wanted.” His sarcasm tore at her; Elisa
fought off sudden tears. 'The man watched her, distantly. "I have to make
out the death certificate. I’ll need you to sign the forms, so see me before
you leave. I’ll be in the office.”
When he was gone, she did cry, great wracking sobs that left her
breathless and shuddering. Louise watched her, silent, a hand on Elisa’s
shoulder. 'The grief was more than simply Tom’s death. It was the gestalt:
the dingy room, the barrenness of Tom’s passing, the contemptuous hos-
tility of the doctor, the miserable loneliness that stretched behind
her . . . and before her. The weeping passed, and she sat beside the body,
sniffing, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue Louise silently handed her,
wondering — obscurely — if she’d ruined the mascara she’d hurriedly put
on that morning. "I must look a mess,” she said.
"That you do, honey. Why don’t you go clean up, then go into the
lounge. I got coffee on, and they got to take care of 'Tom. Okay?” Louise
smiled, patting Elisa’s shoulder.
"Okay.” She rose, glancing down again at the body. Louise hugged
her; that started the tears again. Elisa clung to the thin nurse and Louise
EVENING SHADOW
79
simply held her, smoothing her hair until, gasping, Elisa drew back.
"God, I’m acting silly.”
"No more’n anyone who’s lost someone she’d loved. Go on, girl. Get
yourself cleaned up.”
Elisa felt slightly better when she came back into the lounge. The door
to Tom’s room was closed; she could hear indistinct voices inside. The
crying had stuffed up her head — she felt like she’d just had a bad cold.
Louise was waiting. As Elisa entered the lounge, the nurse poured a cup
of coffee for her. "Here. You’ll want it black.”
Louise watched as Elisa blew on the steaming liquid and sipped. They
sat at the same table as the other day. The early sun was just showing
over the courtyard. Elisa set her cup down. Louise was still gazing at
her, a faint smile on her mahogany face. Elisa cocked her head inquir-
ingly.
"You ain’t his gran’daughter, are you?”
Elisa tried to smile. "Of course I am. I — ”
"Elisa, it don’t matter to me. I never thought you were, not after I got
to talkin’ with you.” Louise folded her hands on the table. "So, you gonna
tell me?”
Elisa shrugged and said nothing.
Louise frowned at her. "You need to trust people more, girl.”
Elisa laughed, soft and bitter. "I’ve tried that.”
"And because it didn’t work once or twice you ain’t gonna try it again?”
Louise grimaced, and sighed deeply. "Honey, I don’t know if I’d believe
what I think you might tell me. I might just think that you’re some crazy
woman been takin’ too many drugs that messed up her mind. I might
think that the reason Tom was so bitter was because he couldn’t help
you none either. I don’t know what the truth is. Right now all I see’s a
young woman with lots of trouble and grief. That’s what I care about.
Can I help?”
"You already have.”
Louise reached over the table. She took Elisa’s hand in her own. She
shook her head, frowning. From the hallway, an orderly stuck his head
into the room. "Louise,” he said. "They’re ready.”
The nurse sighed. Her hand drifted away from Elisa’s. Louise downed
the rest of her coffee in a gulp and stood. "Okay, girl, we gotta go. They’re
taking Tom. You all right?”
"Fine.”
"That’s a lie, too, but guess it’ll have to do.” Louise began to walk
toward the door as Elisa moved her chair back from the table.
Tom had asked that his body be cremated. Elisa made arrangements
with a local funeral home that Louise recommended. She fought with the
80 STEPHEN LEIGH
director who wanted her to pay for embalming and a fancy casket, and
then accompanied the body to the crematorium and watched them give
Tom to the flames. She was the only mourner present. She’d thought
that maybe Agatha would have heard about Tom’s death and come; Elisa
was glad she hadn’t — it was one less confrontation to face, one fewer set
of lies to tell.
Afterward, she went back to the motel. She packed her bag, intending
to pay her bill and leave. Yet she couldn’t. Sitting on the bed, she pulled
a slip of paper from her purse. She picked up the phone and punched in
the numbers. One ring, two, three: Elisa was about to hang up when
someone answered.
"Hello?”
"Louise?”
The line crackled, hissed. "Elisa, that you? What’s the matter, girl?”
She didn’t know what to say. She was drained, devoid of words. The
faint voice on the other end seemed too distant. "Elisa?”
"Umm, listen,” Elisa said, afraid that Louise might hang up if she
didn’t speak. "I know that it’s — ” she hesitated and then the words came
out in a rush " — Could I come and see you?”
Had the answer been at all delayed, had it seemed hesitant, Elisa
would have made excuses. She would have laughed and pretended that
the request had simply been an idle whim. But Louise spoke immediately.
"Of course. Sam’ll drive over with me and get you — ^he’s jus’ sittin’ here
watching TV. We’ll be right there. You okay?”
The relief she felt made her laugh, a giggle ending in a half-sob. "I
think I’m fine now. I just don’t want to be alone for a while, that’s all.
You’re sure it’s not an imposition?”
"Don’t be so blamed polite, girl. I got cake and coffee, and I’ll show
you off to Sam — he’s a sucker for a pretty face like yours. We can sit and
talk if that’s all you want. Honey, you sound terrible. Look, just pack
your things while we’re on our way. We got a room you can use and that
motel’s pretty dismal.”
"You always take in strays?”
"Three cats and two dogs.”
"I couldn’t,” Elisa said, automatically.
"You don’t have a choice, girl. Sam’s already got the keys out.”
"Louise, thank you. I can’t tell you what this means.”
"Yes, you can. That’s the price of admission. It may take some time,
but that’s somethin’ we got enough of, I guess. How ’bout it?”
Elisa clutched at the receiver. In the background, she could hear noise:
a door opening and closing, a TV set being turned off in mid-word.
Louise’s breath rattled the receiver, patient. A dog barked.
"I’ll be ready,” Elisa said. #
EVENING SHADOW
81
EL MILI/OY
DE LkS ISL AS
by Avram Davidson
art: Hank Jankus
Avram Davidson’s latest novel, Marco Polo and the Sleeping
Princess, was written in coilaboration with Grania ^
Davis, and is just out from Baen Books. His other ^ ■
recent works inciude; the novei Vergil in Avemo,
the coiiection Collected Fantasies ,
and the anthoiogy Magic for Sale.
Ah, las islas encantadas! Ah, in fact, the visions which the name itself
enconjures! How many other archipelagoes, some of them quite non-
existent, have borne that enchanted name before it was finally settled
on the group of islands in the South Atlantic . . . settled at least by some,
that is. Perhaps these wild, wild islands had indeed not ever been visited
by Da Gama, Vespucci, the brothers Pinzon, Sebastian Cabot, Ponce de
Leon, Cartier, Drake, Sir Jno. Hawkins, and many another. And then,
after all, perhaps they had. As Lope de Vega (^Cervantes? ^Calderon?)
puts it in his dry, spare style, iQuien Sabe?
Not I.
My friend Diego had driven up with the Land Rover of his choice — a
Safari Wagon, with space for twelve passengers and the driver (much
good it would be without one), or, say, two people and lots and lots of
baggage: a point which he made almost at once.
"Oh, I don’t doubt it,” I said, admiring the spare tire, and fancying
myself . . . almost ... in Kenya, with Papa.
"How would you like to drive down to the Straits of Magellan?”
"Sorry. I just washed my beard, and I can’t do a thing with it.”
"No, I am not joking; how would you like — ”
"Diego. Please.”
And that was how I came to be driving down to the Straits of Magellan.
Can one drive up to it? (them?) Certainly ... if you start in Tierra del
Fuego. Nothing to it, I suppose. Diego told me many stories of his boyhood,
his family, his yoimg manhood, his family, his country. And his family.
After we crossed the Equator (I had crossed it twice, by sea, and was able
to contain my enthusiasm this third time) the stories grew fewer, and
his sighs more frequent. I do not wish to, indeed I can’t, dismiss the
entire South American continent cavalierly (or, for that matter, in any
other way) — ^but this is not that story. As we went further and further
South, of course, it grew colder and colder. As for the land along the
Straits of Magellan, I realized that they had never been fully developed
as Summer resorts; they were, I understood, cold. Very cold. And very,
very wet.
After rising from sleep and sleeping bag one morning almost in slow
motion, I faced not only the foothills of the Andes (I was looking west-
ward), but the fact that I was not only no longer young, I was not even
middle-aged any more. "Diego,” I said, "my osteopath told me there would
be days like this: plain old degenerative osteoarthritis done got me. Leave
me here to sink my bones into some hot bath, and catch me when you
come back.” Although Diego gave me much sympathy, I felt that he was
in some way rather relieved. Often and vividly as he had described to
me his family, it was by now certain that he faced returning to them
84
AVRAM DAVIDSON
with something less than the wilder zeals. Folklore has prepared us for
the Latin Americans with very many stereotypes, so that when they pick
up their guitars and burst into "iAlla en rancho grande!” — and some-
times they really do — we feel that this is all as it should be, and we are
prepared for that. But folklore has not prepared us, in North America,
with any stereotypes at all, really, for Latin Americans of the deep south
of South American latitudes. Reunited with his family after many years
in the United States, how would Diego react? How would his family
react? And how would I react? Perhaps these considerations also engaged
Diego’s mind, for, although he assured me that hot baths were available
in his family home, his tone lacked something of its once-enthusiasm.
"At any rate,” he said at last, "I cannot simply leave you,” his arms
swept the chill, sparse landscape, "here.”
"Well, in the next town or city, then.”
"No, no: mucha bronca gente. Ah!” his face lit up, "I shall leave you
with people I know, in Ereguay! It is not far, no, no, not even so far as
the distance between New York and Milwaukee. I know some people
there very well, no, nonsense, they are very nice people, they will be very
glad to have you.” All this (I thought to myself) was as it may be; but
it was no time nor place for an argument; once there in that other country,
about which I knew next to nothing, surely I could find what we used
to call "reasonable accommodations”; Diego might assure me till his
breath stopped smoking, but, face to face with the realities of the situ-
ation, he would accept my decision.
Gad! he’d better!
The rest of the trip, that is, of my trip to Ereguay, was rather painful,
bodily; but the spirit of the journey seemed to have lightened with our
common realization that, after all, Diego would not have to explain his
family to me, and me to his family. That all the reproachful scenes
beginning, "Far be it from me to reproach you, but,” could now do without
the intrusive presence of an outsider and a foreigner, de populo barbaro,
as it were. Popwlo? Popolo? Oh, well.
Descriptions of the fertile vineyards, the empires of wheat, the plan-
tations of yerba mat(t)e, herds of kine and swine: these I must leave to
others: lo! are they not already waiting in the wings?
The weather grew warmer, though never hot. The suburb where my
friend’s friends lived was old, and, I have imagined, Roman-suburb-like,
with many a well-tended vegetation, lots of well-kept walls, and even
(the plant which I chiefly recognized) roses, roses; the senores Murphy
were at home — what? yes, Murphy. It would be indeed charming to write
they still, after three, or who knows maybe more, generations, still spoke
English with a lovely brogue; not so. No brogue at all? No brogue at all.
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
85
he had brought me to Murphys with no brogue at all. Of course, yes, they
did speak English, only English did they speak as soon as it was realized
that this was my language; it was a rather flattened-out English, you
would never in a million years have guessed, had you met them in, say,
Switzerland, what part of the world they were from. And they expressed
no surprise at all on learning that Diego proposed to deposit me with
them; evidently this was, really was, the way things were done down
there. Diego lingered three days, so it was scarcely that he was dropping
me abruptly. And, as we waved him off, laden with gifts for his parents,
I seemed to be part of the family which belonged in that villa, in that
never-before-heard-of-by-me suburb of Ciudad Ereguay — of which, in
fact, I had hardly heard of, itself, until then. A papal person had not long
before said, publicly, that he was there to represent church interests in
Paraguay, Uruguay, Ereguay, "and every other kind of -guay” (i.e.
"woe”); it was curious how very suddenly the Vatican had need of him
at home, after all. I make no claim that I saw "the real Ereguay,” indeed,
even the unreal Ereguay I scarcely saw outside the very far-stretching
walls of the villa where, twice a day, a hot bath was drawn for me, and
where I received every conceivable creature comfort and every conceiv-
able courtesy. In very little time the youngest children climbed into my
lap, and even the next to youngest also came over and gave me a good
morning and a goodnight kiss. Beside my ample bed, a "matrimonial”
in the grand old style, upon the nightstand were laid such items as an
English-language newspaper (rather thin, as though the fat had been
stripped off it), an elderly novel by Michael Arlen, but one which I had
never read, and a fairly recent copy of the Illustrated London News.
But if I were to go into detail we should never get anywhere, so let us
get to a sort of small garden party, no, not a party, an informal gathering,
well, it was in the garden; it was only a few days that I had been a guest,
I was sure that I had yet to meet every single member of the extended
Murphy family, let alone very many members of the English-speaking
population of Ciudad Ereguay. There was a senora Angela de Something,
whose husband was Someone in the civil service, un burdcrata, as it was,
I thought, succinctly put; a doctora Maria del Pilar Guzman, I am not
certain of the area of her doctorate — gastroenterology perhaps, early
colonial rent-rolls perhaps, you can’t tell any more, men or women; how-
ever — I am aware of opening myself to all sorts of attacks, but never-
theless I shall make this statement: I seldom saw a woman of the upper
middle or upper classes there who did not have lines of discontent around
the mouth, and I seldom saw a woman of the working class there who
was not happy and smiling and laughing. Spit on me, stone me, that’s
the way I saw it. There was an older man all in black and white, who
at first glimpse I thought was a priest, but upon further attention was
86
AVRAM DAVIDSON
revealed to be an attorney; and there was a younger man, light-haired,
in open shirt and khakis, whom I did not assess: he turned out to be a
priest. Presently there entered a young man who was not introduced, he
had rather longish and very brown hair, a farmer or perhaps a hunter
by the look of him, and I don’t recall that he said three words all the
time he was there. And also someone was there, a dona Alberta, certain
to be recognized everywhere as a Universal Grandmother; she was a
moderately well-known British novelist on a visit from her home in the
Isle of Wight. There were one or two others. I do not remember.
Someone had politely asked dona Alberta something, and she said,
"I am always interested in hearing of the legends and folklore wherever
I am. Vin du pays, one might say. Won’t someone please tell me some-
thing of that?” She was a courageous woman; very often one is told fairly
crisply that there are no legends, no folklore, all such things have passed
quite away. But now, almost at once, licenciado Huebner said, "Ah, of
course! We have the tragical tale of la llorona,” and he proceeded to tell
us, in great detail and with much local color, the story of The Weeping
Woman, which is found wherever Spanish is spoken and mis-spoken
throughout the world; right at this moment in your city someone is telling
it now, and naming the very neighborhood, through which you have
unwittingly passed, where the unfortunate events occurred. I purposely
do not tell it here, let it come, perhaps, as a surprise.
Someone said, "Muy tragico.” Heads were nodded. And then someone
else said, "Well, we have also the legend of el vilvoy de las islas.”
The novelist asked, "Did you say 'veal boy’? Or 'beel voy’?”
Our host spelled it for her (and for me, too), "V-i-l-v-o-y,” and added,
"We pronounce it — ”
But I did not then hear how they pronounced it, because before the
attorney had more than begun, the young priest — not meaning, I am
sure, to be impolite, merely he was a bit emphatic — said, " 'El Vilvoy,’
but that is surely a collection of nonsense!”
The attorney said, very calmly, and as one certain of his facts, "Some-
times we provincials, with all our naif enthusiasm, nevertheless arrive
at a conclusion more veridical than the sophisticates of the metropolis.”
"Oh, but surely I did not say 'provincials’; and if, by 'the metropolis,’
you mean Spain, or Madrid in particulr, certainly I am a madrileno,
but — ”
A servant approached with a tray. " 'El vilvoy,’ ” repeated Mrs. Phlux
(her real name), the novelist. "But what does that mean?” More than one
person began, perhaps, to reply.
Our host, taking advantage of the abrupt silence which fell after sev-
eral people had realized that they were all speaking at once, said, in a
rather musing voice, "It is certainly rather curious, indeed coincidental.
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
87
but . . . just this morning I was in the library, looking through some old
volumes, especially a set of Dickens which I suppose my grandfather had
had bound as it had his rubrico embossed on the covers, when I found
a sort of scrapbook which had been maintained on this subject. Here is
Ruy with the chocolate for which his wife is famous, and I shall ask him
to bring the scrapbook while we are sipping some of it.”
The chocolate well deserved that she should be famous, it was excellent
(Lina had made it. Her name was Lina), it was miraculous. And while
Alberta Morris (her maiden- and pen-name) was drinking it, her eyes
seemed to grow larger and larger. She gave a perceptible smack as she
took the cup away from her mouth, and then she said, " 'El vibroy’l But
what does that mean?”
From La Voz de la Nacion, With Seccion in ingles;
What a storm of outrage swept through the streets and houses of
our Ciudad Ereguay when one heard yesterday night that affront
had been offered to our well-known and well-beloved mis Brethe
ohara by a bruto whose name will shortly be discovered by our
conscientious polis who all night sourced the meaner streets and
alliedways which do no honour to us. The dear mis Vertha the
grand daughter of capitan Monserrat our great Patriotic Hero had
been delayed on some errand of merci to an umble casa near the
port section of «town» when coming out en route to the awaiting
carriage of her Papa the inglis coronel OHara (the idiom ingles
does not contain of the letter R, hence coronel = coZoraeZ and
Londres =Lo/icZora, how curious) when from the penumbrous area
of some copse of trees there emerged that criminal Typico with
pistole in hand who seized this innocent Mis roughly by one arm
and exclaimed, — I will have at least jour money and jperhaps
more!”
In the opinion of some people (in fact, of lots), a little of such style goes
a long way. A very long way. And yet . . . someone many years ago told
me, as regards "more accurate” translations of the Bible, that he would
rather read Arise, O Lord than Get up, God. And although we are dealing
here with an entirely secular text, yet there is a something in the flavor
of the Basic Form of it which appeals to me more than a smoother version
might. Readers who disagree will still, I hope, excuse me if some more
of the original from time to time seeps through.
Avanti.
Leaving to one side his discursions about the importance to the national
economy of the Col. O’Hara’s factory where Ereguayan cattle were pro-
cessed into an essence of beef much advertised in the United Kingdom,
88
AVRAM DAVIDSON
and reminders of the late and great Cap. Monserrat’s famous charge up
the slope of Castel Ereguay to bring the Royal Spanish flag tumbling
down; our reporter (Senor Cruz) at length describes the young girl’s
piteous cries for help, the shameful cowardice of some unnamed "city-
men” who were nearby but evidently afraid of the "pistole” — and finally
plunges into the matter of our story, videlicet that there then stepped
forward with impetuous gait a most remarkable young man in almost
ragged garments in antique cut of "raw hyde” and upon his feet curious
footwear devised also from the uncured skin of an animal, such as one
has not observed in years but only in illustrations of some old leyendas.
Upon his head also a hat of shaggy leather.
This young man of such startling appearance, when he heard the cry
of fear and pain from the defenseless girl, Mssi Evereth, uttered a savage
shout and leaped forward swinging his bushknife, or machete. Quickly
he slashed in such a way as to draw the scoundrel’s blood, who [the
scoundrel] was immediately lost to sight as he fled, the coward, into the
enveloping darkness.
It appears that he made his way, the monster, to the night clinic of
the Medical Hospital where he attempted to have reattached the severed
ear, which he had brought with him "untidily wrapt” in a rag. But the
"advanced medical student” on duty insisted that "a chirurgeon” would
have to be summoned. Whereat "the retch fled yet again into the night.
And one hears that he is attempting to depart our Countery by the back
trials. But the frontera guards have been alerted by telegraph and he
must soon be catched, the fiend. Unless of course he may find refuge
amongst the teeming criminals which always protect the profugitives in
the adjacent republic (so-called) of Bobadilla y Las Bonitas (el B & B, as
we crisply put it). Falseley does that other country claim the Las Islas
Encantadas, for which we are ready to shed our blood.”
Further, La Voz de la Nacion had gathered the following information.
The young man whose manners and appearance reminds one of the works
of Juan Jacques Ruso or the novel Paul y Virginia, not to mention the
arcetypo classico Robisson Cruso, is Antonio the son of the pioneer set-
tlers Kielor, Swiss or perhaps Baltico in origin. The patriarco Kielor’s
son resides with his parents and "some infant bothers” in the island
Encantada Grande, whence he has come with his father to the mainland
of our Republic to purchase what few supplies their humble and hard-
working efforts have enabled them to afford. The europeans Sr. and Sra.
Kielor have for several years inhabited all by themselves and young
children this rugged Island part of that archipelago. jSee, how they nat-
urally regard their capital city as Ciudad Ereguay and not of some other
nacion as it speciously proclaims! And there they have lived alone for
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
89
most of one year to another, it being unusual to have even a visit from
a fisherman’s bote because of distance and the savage seas.
Having been thus raised practically alone in a wildness, he has grown
up, as one says, «a wild boy,» wearing no clothes not a produduccion of
that wildness and "never was sick a day in his life,” as he declares in his
simple wholesome and naif way. Although void of any artifice and en-
tirely sans sophistication exactly as one has read about in books by
european savants. But consider the bravery of this doubtless Wilde Boy
who has never been one day in school, how he rushed forward, careless
of his own life, a true cavalier of the wilderness, he well deserves to be
considered a noble son and citizen of this Republic, the justly named
wildboy without a thought of fear, so similar to the bravo capitan Mon-
serrat, our National Hero, whose gamddaughter [here the clipping ends]
Thus the report as written by Gustavo Gomez Cruz, who for many
years wrote the English-language column Amigos Friends, for the daily
La Voz de la Nacion of which allegedly his brother-in-law was sole pro-
prietor; but what difference does it make? As for this first mention of
"Antonio” Kielor, it seems certain that mostly it was true. Thus the
legend of the Wild Boy of the Islands sprang almost full grown in an
instant, or anyway in a night. A few comments now to those sceptical
persons who are everywhere. It is said that the boy certainly did not
wear a goatskin hat in the manner of Crusoe, but that the hatband may
have been goatskin. It is said that his clothes were certainly not all made
of rawhide, though parts of them may have been — and certainly his shoes
or sandals or boots, whatever one may call them (moccasins?) had been
made by the elder Kielor himself; and why not? Furthermore, in regard
to the incident at the Night Door of the hospital, there has been some
sceptical insistence that the man who had appeared there for medical or
surgical attention to his ear had certainly not carried it with him in a
rag, despite the firmness of the legend on this detail; but that it had been
severely bitten in a cantina brawl and bore no mark of a slash with a
sharp weapon such as a machete. (As for the Legend, it adjusted itself
on this point: the Wild Boy had both slashed the thug with his machete
and then bitten off his ear . . . which the thug then wrapped in a rag and
carried with him to the Infirmary: a newspaper drawing not long after
showed a figure looming out of darkness and carrying in one hand a
pistol and in the other an Object out of which blood dripped along the
ground. It was very vivid; indeed the stuff of legend.) As for the subse-
quent history of this man — or, if there were indeed two — either man:
there is no subsequent history; fables of an earless man howling for
revenge in the moonlight are, simply, fables. The darkness had swallowed
him or them and the darkness continued to, as it were, keep him/them
90
AVRAM DAVIDSON
swallowed. Which, since we are in the presence of Legend, is perhaps as
it should be.
And in regard to the young man’s given name, really it was not An-
tonio, an understandable mistake; evidently his full name was William
Washington Kielor; this not having been fixed into law by the Medes
and the Persians, he was sometimes called "Bill,” sometimes "Billy,” and
sometimes (often) "Tony.” And the elder Kielors were, very simply, from
the Isle of Man . . . perhaps this is not as simple as it sounds ... it may
be that Sr. Gomez Cruz really did think that Man was a canton in
Switzerland or an island in the Baltic Sea (there, after all, are islands
in the Baltic Sea . . . aren’t there?), or, it might be, that the word Manx-
man was a bit beyond him. At any rate, the elder Kielors had had some
earlier experiences with island life. Why didn’t they, if tired of, say, life
in London, simply go back to the Isle of Man? Perhaps because it was
full of English tourists, all hoping to hear one of the eleven or fifteen
people who could still speak Manx. And as for that simply despicable
person sitting over there in the corner and muttering that the old Manx
form of the name was Illiam (cognate Gaelic Liam), without an initial
"W” — why, let him go back where he came from.
Senor Murphy having paused at this point to wet his whistle, like,
with a sip of chocolate, Senora Murphy turned to the ?hunter? farmer?
fellow; "Your family, they are all well, I trust?” The young man answered,
simply, "Yes.” After a moment she said, "My aunt will appear presently.”
I had, somehow, a faint impression that she had forgotten or simply did
not know his name, but she had evidently touched the right note, because
he then said, "Ah.” Not one of your very talkative types, evidently. Afraid
he might scare away the game, or make the off-ox turn left instead of
Right. Ivan Sanderson once said that people speak of "the silence of the
jungle,” when, really, they are very noisy places ... or did Ivan San-
derson say just the opposite? I met him once or twice, a very nice man:
but he is gone now.
But, as to the matter of "William” or of "Bill,” that is nothing compared
to the word(s) . . . phrase, perhaps . . . title, perhaps . . . set down crisply
enough by Gomez Cruz at least twice (if not consistently) as "Wild Boy.”
Although one stands, shall we say, surprised at his statement that "Eng-
lish contains no 'R,’ ” it certainly seems that Spanish does not make
abundant use of "W.” Let us, however, not forget that "W” = Double
"U,” that "U” and "V” are variant forms of the same letter, and that
there are a number of languages (including Spanish) in which "V” and
"B” are not what one would call clearly distinct: consider Servia and
Serbia, Habana and Havana, Sevastopol and Sebastopol — and, for that
matter, Avram and Abram. The second given name of old Kielor’s oldest
son was to cause the journalists and typesetters of Ciudad Ereguay enor-
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
91
mous difficulties: sometimes it appeared as Vashington, sometimes as
Boshindon or even Uachignton, or . . . sometimes . . . Washington. (Old
Kielor was much impressed by Immense Liberator Figures.) But mostly
young Kielor was referred to in the press as The Wild Boy, two English
words also not without their transliterational difficulties and which went
through sundry forms as El Vild Boy, Wild Voy, Vildouy, or — finally and
eternally — Vilvoy: a headline from some time later: BIENVENIDA VIL-
VOY. Further transmutations and confusions, such as Bill Boy, Billy
Boy, and Bell Boy, we will leave as well enough alone. Vilvoy. There!
The Ereguayans knew a good loanable word when they saw one; it just
took them a while to pin it down and stabilize it. And have we of the
inglish idiom done a sight better with Montecuzuma or whatever,
and — ^for that matter — batata'?
No indeed.
Well, that more or less completes our survey of what we might call El
Vilvoy, Part One.
Onward.
It was the practice for many years of Col. O’Hara, in his capacity as
Honorary British Vice-Consul, to call formally once a year at the Pres-
idential Palace and deliver a Note reminding the Republic of the British
Claim to Las Islas Encantadas (HM Government, what with the Maori
and the Mahdi and other such vexatious people, having other matters
than that small southern Atlantic archipelago on the front of their desks.
What? "its”? "desks”? Nonsense. "Her Majesty’s Government are,” no
more to be said) — Claim to Las Islas Encantadas (or, as My Lords pre-
ferred to call them. Lord Iggen’s Islands); after the delivery of which The
President would give him a glass of sherry and a segar . . . both, we
understand, very good . . . and then they would enjoy a half-hour’s pleas-
ant conversation on the subject of, as it might be, horseflesh . . . that is
to say, not hippophagy, but breeding. French reminders of the French
Claim were more sporadic (echo in Coda Dia, of Ciudad Bobadilla: NA-
POLEON III HAS ESCAPED FROM ENGLAND AND IS DESTINED
TO ARRIVE IN THE ISLAS ENCANTADAS. Nap Three never made
the scene, alas.). But the Claims of the adjacent Republic (adjacent to
Ereguay, that is; not to France) of Bobadilla y Las Bonitas were some-
thing else. True that both Republics were agreed that Spanish sover-
eignty of the Islands, after the overthrow of Spanish colonial rule, had
passed to . . . had passed to . . . passed, aye, there’s the rub! Passed to
whom? Or, to which? Opinions differed. They very much differed. And
continued to differ.
Nine Days Wonders we always have with us, and perhaps interesting
news was a bit scarce at that time, at any rate, the newspapers in Ciudad
92 AVRAM DAVIDSON
Ereguay certainly made very much of the Vilvoy. And so did opinion in
the not-inconsiderable portion of the public which did not read news-
papers. Tributes to his modesty and, if not to his piety (old Kielor, on
the single occasion when he was solicited about theology, declared him-
self to be a believer in An Universal Force or Influence, y nada mas),
then anyway to his filial piety: headline in La Prensa Nacional: VILVOY
THINKS ONLY OP HIS PAPA. We who described yesterday the collec-
tion of a purse to reward the Wil Voy for his courage are now proud to
disclose that, when asked what gift he desired, the vil voy replied, "Only
a pouch of good English tobacco for his papa!” It seems that the father
Kielor grows naturally his own tobacco in those Islands which pertain
to our Country, but this year the crop was not all what was hoped for.
Colonel Ohara, father of the augustly descended sweet and becomingly
timid girl whose life the Vil Dvoy saved, immediately ordered purchased
and placed on board the fishingvessel by which father and son will return
to their chosen island of settlement an entire case of the best Inglish pipe
tobacco available from the enterprising merchnats here. El Vilvoy pro-
fessed himself delighted. The Prensa has learned that the coronel has
offered either or both of the Kielors good employment at the factory
which produces the beef essence that the English use as tea, but that
they both declared that nothing will make them surrender their resi-
dencia and small farm which with such hard labour they have acked, or
hewn as one might say, from the wilness. We are also precisely informed
by the Ministry of National Lands that a writ of title to the aforesaid
terrain will be most immediately issued to the senor Kielor.
Senora K. had remained in the Islands with her younger children;
when asked if he were not eifraid of her safety the father Kielo declared
that no one who lives under the flag of the Republic of Ereguay need
fear any man. Also he reminds us that in a true state of the Natura one
lives in harmony with nature’s laws, and then remains always without
the well-founded fears to which the urban dweller is a prey. Both he and
his brave son el vilvoy wear their hair much long except that the latter
of course has almost no veard upon his manly young face. Observe please
readers the likeness of his fearless and untainted countenance in this
Press via means of the latest photographic process . . .
Thus it is possible precisely to date the first-known photograph of el
vilvoy; and in fact this photograph was reproduced and sold widely for
quite a while through the cuidad and in one or two provincial towns,
both in black-and-white and in sepia.
Father and son (and a cargo of more supplies than either had hoped
for; old Kielor would not accept money, which he in fact called by many
harsh names; but he agreed to accept agricultural tools, seeds, and nurs-
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
93
ery stock, fishing lines and hooks, gunpowder, lead, cartridges, and a
nice new shotgun) returned presently to their far-distant Island Home.
Quite a throng saw them off at the mole. And the Ministry of Correction
and Justice quietly put away its plans to locate a penal colony somewhere
in the Islands.
When the newspapers said (as say they did) that the President of
Ereguay, Eduardo Caspar de la Vara, D.D.S., had promised that he would
visit the pioneering family when he could manage to find the time to
escape from the cares of state, they said but the truth. Dr. de la Vara
was then in his forty-second year, he had attained to office entirely by
constitutional means and he was determined to leave office in the same
manner. His physician. Dr. Cipriano Madariaga, said to him one day
after the routine examination, "Previous holders of your august office
have been either soldiers or attorneys; you are unique in having a sci-
entific degree, therefore may I speak with you, not as citizen to president,
but as one scientist to another?”
"Securely you may,” said el doctor don Edutirdo. "Proceed.”
"If I were to work too hard,” said Madariago, "my assistant could
always assume my duties — for a limited period of time, of course. ("Of
course.”) Only . . . the lay person scarcely appreciates that the corpus
and the spiritus are entirely intertwined; do you agree?”
"Agreement the most absolute.”
"We say of a garment made of good sound cloth, that 'it wears like
iron,’ do we not? and yet even iron may eventually wear out, so — ”
Here the president interrupted. He was a small man. But he was
courageous. "Are you about to tell me. Sir Medicin Doctore, that I am
aboout to wear out?”
The physician crossed himself three times. "I beg of you, my friend,
do not jump to conclusions. Any man who works hard may require a rest
in order to recuperate his powers. But if, unlike, say, me, you should
require a rest, is there someone who could assume your duties until — ”
Perhaps Gaspar de la Vara rapidly considered the political state of
affair in Ereguay. "Sir Medical Doctor, you have reason!” he exclaimed.
"No, there is not . . . save, perhaps for the very shortest period of time.”
Dr. Madariaga nodded. "How short a period of time? Could you not
take a rest for . . . say . . . two weeks? Only two weeks? As your friend,
I implore you. As your physician, I order you!”
Gaspar de la Vara came to a, perhaps, rapid decision. "And what sort
of a rest?” he enquired. "For two weeks, not more.”
"Alas,” said the physician, "we have here no healing springs, spas,
they are called in Europe. How they invigorate! How they juvenescate!
But . . . facts are facts . . . and in the absence of any such in our own
country, and as it is impossible to go to Europe right now, I have no
94
AVRAM DAVIDSON
hesitation to recommend ...” He hesitated. ". . . .a short sea-voyage,”
he concluded. And watched the other’s face.
Immediately the President exclaimed, "I shall make a cruise of our
overseas territories!”
"You will sail around the Enchanted Islands in the national yacht?”
"No, I shall go via the steam vessel — and I shall keep well in mind the
maritime wisdom of the Liberator!” His friend the medical doctor slapped
him on the back, and they embraced.
From a contemporary statement in La Voz: "The President will make
a voyage of inspection beyond the seas in keeping with the famous mar-
itime maxim of the Liberator. Did not the Liberator himself declare that,
'Whoso controls the sea, controls the coast; and whoso controls the coast
controls the interior. Therefore, whoso controls the sea, paradoxical as
it may seem, he controls the interior’? Indeed. It is not necessary to
explicate the reference to the Liberator Ignacio Gk)mez de la Cedilla,
often called the San Martin (or the Bolivar) of Central Coastal South
America, East; of whom the whole world has heard. Almost.”
In fact, the Republic of Ereguay was the current owner of the loco-
motive vessel La Victoria (formerly Her Britannic Majesty’s Steam Ram
Sink); and this at a time when the adjacent Republic of Bobadilla y Las
Bonitas had only recently recognized that the gallery was obsolete, and
the adjacent Republic of Nueva Andorra had acquired the former Con-
federate privateer Arkansas (it had been engaged, in the interim, in the
corned-mutton trade out of Port Bangalong, Eastern Australia). 'This
exemplum of "the fleet in being” had struck terror into the hearts of all
would-be invaders of the Ereguayan littoral (not even do we exempt
Brazil). Commanding the Victoria was the capitan da Costa, and also
present was the learned and unpredictable Dr. Hector Macvitty.
Capitan da Costa made up for his Brazilian birth by voicing objections
whenever the Emperor’s name was mentioned; "a tawdry fellow,” he
called him, "a freemason, a yanqui-lover, a friend of the Negroes, and
an imperialista.” The capitan da Costa had visited the not-often-visited
Islands, and so knew an3rway something about them, besides the fact
that they were there. (That was something. It was often reported and
often denied that Nueva Andorra had once sent La Desiderata (formerly
the Arkansas), under a politically-appointed and inexperienced com-
mander, on a voyage to Brazil; asked, upon his return, how were things
in Brazil, he had replied, with a shrug, "Brazil isn’t there”) Dr. Macvitty
did not engage in much conversation, but all the while he made sketches,
of the sort for which he was almost famous. And it is indeed from these
sketches, and from letters to his brother Sawney (the Rev. Alexander
Macvitty), that a number of the details of this voyage have been supplied.
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
95
(The letters and sketches mostly repose in the Lord Marechal’s Library
and Museum in Edinburgh, to the learned Curators of which we express
our thanks; their charges have been, considering inflation and rates of
exchange, almost modest.)
Nevertheless, we will not bore readers — at any rate, I hope I am not
boring mine — with many details. Though the South Atlantic seas can be
very rough indeed, one reason no doubt why the Islas had been so seldom
visited, the voyage of La Victoria was fairly untroubled. She anchored
in the windward of Encantada Grana and several times a day people put
ashore in her small boat, or "launch”; and of course the shore visits of
the passengers were more frequent than those of most of the crew, who,
truth to tell, were not much inclined to land on these Isles containing
none of the amenities which sailors prefer to encounter whilst ashore.
And a very wild and rocky shore it was, too, though little did this seem
to disarrange the famous Great Tortoises.
"See these great tortoises. Your Excellency!”
"Never mind such titles, Capitan; call me simply 'Doctor’; but where
are they all going? So very, very slowly?”
"Either to crunch the flesh of the prickly-pear cactus between their
homy jaws, or in search of those hidden springs which they alone, mostly,
know about.”
Consider, then, at this time, the President of the Republic — no silk
hat, no frock coat, no sash of office, no: clad in simple costume borrowed
from the third mate, and with the same well-worn sombrero de jipijapa
which he wore (almost one wishes to say, wears, so strong is habit!) at
home, how eagerly he traverses the rocky landscape of the largest of the
Islands which never before had been trodded by presidential foot; observe
the slight flush of pleasure and the quick degree of impatience, he brushes
aside all offers of "helping hands,” and soon, with only a single guard
to accompany him, he vanishes into the brush, or bush, or however one
wishes to describe it; those trees of which the sound of an axe has seldom
menaced, the dense thicketry, the —
"Come, follow me!” exclaims the capitan da Costa in a tone of command
which never he would have used to the President himself; "I know of a
short-cut, we will soon encounter them!” Everybody obeys; sure enough,
a trail is found, all follow it, birds call out, the small animalitos or
insectivos also appear, what glorious and one may accurately say, gor-
geous, butterflies: but what care, momentarily, the visitors, save for the
taciturn Dr. Macvitty, who, almost as he moves, he sketches,
sketches — behold! the party has reached at last the small plantation
which the pioneer settler family, those profugitives from the scurrying
and unhealthy throngs of European city-dwellers, has cleared, with great
labor, from the bosque: there is the Family Kielor, almost as though they
96
AVRAM DAVIDSON
had gathered for the purpose of welcoming the President. The father
Kielor greets his civic leader with a warm handshake and an embrace,
the mother Kielor leaves for a moment the home-made frame on which
she embroiders, so to speak, textiles made from the wild flax with threads
spun from a local fibre and dyed with local dies-stuff, representations of
the autochthonous flora and fauna, and waves her hand at the great chief
magistrate; several small boys of various 'sizes at first stand off shyly,
then slowly creep forward and are greeted with paternal pats upon their
heads. A delicious odor fills the air — to be specific, a "lunch” was cooking,
of goatsflesh and several sorts of names and patatas, as well as the
famous wild spinaches so good against the dreaded scurvy. After some
few minutes the President says, "But I do not see here your oldest son,
whom always we fondly remember by the name of el vilvoy, forever will
we remember with what bravery he bit off the ear of that savage fellow,
a foreigner I need not say, whilst defending the sweet mis Ohara, la
bertita chica; where is he?”
Scarcely has [The above account, transposed from the holographic,
seems rather confused: on the one hand the President has vanished into
the woods with one single naval guardsman, and yet here he is described
as being already present at the Kielor house and farm, with no expla-
nation or transition. Well, we must take history as we find it, and, as
the almost fabulous capitan ser Juan Smiht so aptly puts it. History
without Geography is a wandering carcase, or perhaps it is the other
way around; the capitan ser Juhan Esmiss, rescuer of las pocahontas,
was not a literary man] scarcely has the initial burst of enthusiasm
subsided sufficiently for the babble of voices to terminate for a moment,
when distinctly are heard some distant shots, securely of firearms. Ex-
claims the elder Kielor, "That is not my son, he took with him this
morning only a machete when he left to examine some traps and snares;
let us go at once in that direction!” And, directly he trots off in another
direction. Navy officers cry commands to their few men and they begin
to run in a more direct direction; but the doctor Macvitty calls out to
warn them of the dangers of the hedge of prickly-pears which they are
about to charge through: of their large thorns which draw blood — and,
much more dangerous, their tiny and usually at first glance unseen
spines, those which break off in the flesh, and fester, causing more in-
fection and sores of great pain, often indeed leaving scars. In a moment
prevail the heads more cooler, it is realized the patriarco Kielor doubtless
knows best the paths of his "own” island; if he runs off in a certain
direction, doubtless it is to find a passable lane through the wilderness
which will presently change its direction according to the contures of
nature. (It is not to be thought that these considerations are the results
of subsequent meditations.) And the reader already knows that the shots
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
97
had been fired by certain troops of the Counter-Claimant Nation for the
sovereignty of las Islas: in other words, not to cavil at the truth, the
Republic of Bobadilla and Las Bonitas, as it is commonly and simply
called. El B & B only in the vulgate.
When the Intelligent Semaphore on the well-sited Goat’s Head Hill,
overlooking la Ciudad de Ereguay and the circumjacent waters had sig-
naled with both its arms out straight that (in other words) a sidewheel
steamer was approaching — ^the black ball hoisted at the same moment
indicating that it was one of our Naval vessels, and next went up the
Presidential flag; at once a crowd began to gather at the mole, for it was
realized that this meant the return of the steam Ram La Victoria, with
the President on board. Meanwhile, of course, as the semaphore contin-
ued working while the ship drew nearer, and both were sending and
transcribing messages to each other; but little heeded this the throng,
most of whom naturally could not read the Semaphore letters, nor had
they telescopes to see what the Ship was saying. But those who had the
knowledge and the means, including of course several people in the
Department of Naval Affairs; as well, naturally, one need hardly say,
the journalists: they were transfixed, electrified, by what these messages
implied. And as word of this spread so rapidly through the City, of course
the crowd grew vast.
The Questions at the "Interview”
Q. Mr. Dr. President, is it indeed true that you had been as it were
lost in the jungle on Encantada Grande and that the Vilvoy himself then
rescued you?
A. With the frankness which characterizes my nature, I answer, sim-
ply, Almost I might have become alarmed, but the Vilvoy heard my calls,
and fairly at once he rescued me.
Q. Ah, thank God! You seem to be in entire good health, in fact one
might say, in better, is it not true?
A. Yes.
Q. And is it also true that this is because the Vilvoy led you to some
medicinal springs of the sort called spa?
A. Perceiving that I was very hot and somewhat fatigued, he did indeed
lead me to some springs in an obscure place, in which certainly I bathed.
As to its medical qualities. Dr. Macvitty regrets that I did not carry away
with me a sample of the spring water, but I had no thought of that. As
for my health, it may be that the exercise and the sea breezes had
something to do with it. But there are more important matters, and if
you will excuse me, I observe that my carriage is over there, and —
Q. Ah, but sir doctor president, what of these important matters? It
is true, then, that some troops of the Counter-Claimant Country, I refer
98 AVRAM DAVIDSON
to el B & B, had landed and were attempting an invasion? the shameless
ones.
A. Yes.
At this, roars of indignation swept the crowd, and, almost immediately,
the City. The survivors of the Invasion had been observed making an
escape in a small bote, from which, it is adjudicated, they transferred
into a larger one. Nothing more than that the coal-supplies of our Steam
Vessel were limited for a return to port only, prevented the capitan da
Costa from at once pursuing this estimated other vessel. But our Nation
was well-satisfied that the villians had suffered a sufficient punishment
in that fearlessly El Vilvoy had attacked with his machete, and, it cannot
be doubted, cut off six of their heads! Effectively, how they could have
resisted with their ^'superior fire-power,” as it is called, save only his
already-perceived famous wild bravery struck terror to their hearts, the
cowards. And they fled. As to the flag which they had previously suc-
ceeded to plant on the volcanic soil of las Islas, one may behold it any
day at the Museum of the National Patrimony, hours from three to four
in the afternoon, a very small sur-charge is necessarily made for the
benefits of Widows and Orphans. But the public may donate the duenos
such gratuities they wish. What greater evidences of breach of faith is
needed to condemn a neighboring nation with whom we were legally at
peace for invading our quasi-patemal soils? Well could we of the Republic
of Ereguay have stricken back and given then, as one says, "titt for tatd,”
save that the generous heart of our then Presidente doctor Caspar de la
Vara was moved to avoid any breach between two adjacent nations of
this Continent; and so, after a period marked by recriminations on their
part and of cold silence on our ovra (imagine, they accused us of Fabri-
cation of the acCount of the Heads!), the matter has passed off and no
longer espoils the cordial relations which now obtain between our two
countries, brothers as we are in blood and language anyway.
But think! of this mere youth, how he fearlessly struck of the heads
of sixteen necessarily much larger grown men! What an ensample for
our jung people to admire! Ah how very well-founded is this le5Tfend of
El Vilvoy de las Islas.
At this point (or perhaps at some other nearly-contemporary point) the
Counter-Claimant Nation simply turned its back on the whole thing:
headline in the Cada Dia newspaper, widely recognized as government
organ: DECLARES THE KING OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY/ The Na-
tions of Europe Are Very Contented to Recognize That the Confederational
Union of Bobadilla AND LAS BONITAS IS INDISSOLUABLE. The
King of Sweden and Norway, that civilized and civil man, was always
willing to issue such declarations whenever his ministers asked
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
99
him . . . and much it helped the union of Sweden and Norway; its effects
on South American sales of canned sardines and wooden matches cannot
be precisely calculated.
So far as is known, only once did El Vilvoy travel into the Interior of
Ereguay ... at least only once which is known ... it is realized that the
generosity of the vaqueros was almost an embarrassment, they inces-
santly surrounding and offering him many copas of Rum Dinga, their
famous naive but strong drink; also constantly they surrounded his horse
and soon all its tails hairs had been plucked out for souvenirs and alleged
cures for the imfirmities of the male person; in these matters of "Ffolk-
wisdon,” who indeed can say? And as it was seemingly impossible, if not
indeed difficult, to avoid almost similar seens in the Ciudad, if thereafter
for sundry times of sundry years he came to the capital and port, it would
have been as incognito, slipping in and out and then away again: his
arrival, departure, presence, alleged comments and appearances, almost
in the popular mine and pewrhasp higher, in some essential details
resembles the doctrine of Sebastianism, as within the memories of some
old and still-living people one found it yet in Brazil, let alone the Question
of in Portugal. But of course the mysticism or not, in essential detail this
difference: El Vilvoy was not dead!*
But —
Ah, the sceptics! The sceptics, O! Of much would the sceptics have
liked to dismiss entirely the matter of the Twenty-six Severed Heads as
lies, old crones’ tails, and propaganda . . . but little have they been able.
There is, for one thing, the testimony of President Doctor Eduardo Caspar
de la Vega, and if revisionist historians would dismiss that; there was,
for another thing, the testimony of the Docttor Mcvitty: was not the dr.
mAc vitty the Author of a learned monograph on Certain Disorders of
the Metatarsals, printed in the Journal of the National Scottish Medical
Association? Little recked the ravings of the Cada Dia newspaper of the
Ciudad de Bobadilla against the inflexible probity of the Journal of the
National Scottish Medical Association (alleged activities of the dr. Ale-
jandro Nkox and the uneducated Herr Bure are entirely beside the point).
It is of course unfortunate that doctor Maevitty’s renewed testimony was
not available at a later date, but he had returned to his native Land,
there to engage upon his life-long crusade to test and maintained the
wholesome nature of Scotch whisky as compared to brandy; and died in
Peebles under muffled circumstances. And there is furthermore the er-
*And one remembers with some small dismay the so-called Riots of Rosarosa, in that remote
rural region, which began when someone in a cantina allegedly denied that El Vilvoy had cut
off seventeen of the heads of the misfortunate invaders. Small wonders that he therafter pre-
ferred, so it seems, the shadows ofbein unrecognized, to the full noontine glare of the Publicity.
100 AVRAM DAVIDSON
refutable testimony of the Sketches: the Sketches, four in number, clearly
show each one clearly six of the Severed Heads reposing on their ledge
or ledges in the Secret Cave, and how respectful were all the parties
involved to refuse to disturb their repose or even to disclose their location,
merely to satisfy a rude curiosity. Or for any other reason. As for the
claim that the four Sketches show the same six heads from slightly
different angles, or that four times six equals twenty-four and not twenty-
six — ^this is a mere quibble. And also remains unidentified the alleged
medical spring.
It is secure that, so far as goes impartial evidence and testimony, El
Vilvoy never acknowledged his heroism in this matter, merely giving a
slight jesture and a «grunt» and a movement slightly of the mouth when-
ever asked of it. How this proves his essential Modesty, that of the
Gentleman of Nature, too educated even to deny what his interlocutter
has enquired.
"Well indeed,” commented the Spanish Priest (in a former time not yet
so very far back at all, priests did not go about in casual dress ever, and
with what dignity, too!). "But it now seems quite evident that those heads
had probably nothing to do with the so-called Invasion, the Las Bonitas
Incursion. Scientists tell us that probably they were the heads (if they
existed at all) of pre-Columbian Indians, there on the Islands for mys-
terious and uncertain reasons.” And it is true that the Heads appear to
be entire heads, unlike those prepared hy the Jivaro Indians rather on
the principle of a stuffed olive: this the priest conceded. Then he said,
"But modem science has determined that organic matter stored, so to
speak, well within a cave at the well-known and naturally-maintained
'Cave Temperature,’ cool but not freezing-cold, well may last forever in
its original form. Witness,” he said, "the hide of the megatherium in
Patagonia, and the deposits of sloth-dung in the cave in North America.
— The Vilvoy led the president and Dr. Maevitty to the cave where the
heads were? Well, perhaps he did, but that in no way proves that he had
put the heads there, let alone removed them from the shoulders of the
soldiers of Las Bonitas.” The others there in the garden of la Villa de
Murphy, moved just a bit restively at this statement, but perhaps all
were too polite to dispute, or even to deny. The mral-looking young man
said nothing; he seemed, if anything, politely a bit bored. Whiffs of mem-
ory, like faint scents of some aromatic plant growing not within sight,
began to be perceived by me. Had he been, perhaps, the man with the
gun and the game-bag, who had nodded to us from the berm of the road
near the forest as we slowed down to avoid a mud rut? I could not be
sure. Or was he one of a couple of people considering a bogged-down piece
of equipment in a field just before we stopped for water?
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
101
"Perhaps, sir, you will give us your opinion,” suggested Licenciado
Huebner, politely.
The young man seemed to consider the question for a second, then he
said, very calmly and equitably, "No.”
And as though the attorney had asked her. "To me,” said la doctora,
after a moment, "the evidence upon the shell of the great tortuga is a
most remarkable thing.” There was a murmur of agreement; and, seeing
that I knew nothing of these things, two or three people recapitulated
for me a conversation back there on Great Enchanted Island. Imagine!
they directed me; imagine that black soil composed of volcanic origins
ground so very fine, and the black rocks scattered around, almost a
terrain of the inferno; here and there, going infinitesimally slowly, the
giant tortoises, moving their flipper-like legs and making so little dis-
tance with each step that one might walk alongside them as they did so.
And in fact, walking exactly so, is President E. Caspar de la Vara, and
so is capitan da Costa. One points out to the other curious and atypical
markings on the giant carapace of one huge crawler. "iMira. MAP and
VYP! Are these not the initials of the explorer-brothers Martin Alfonso
and Vicente Yanez Pinzon?”
"Indeed, indeed! What else? And examine this set carved on the other
side!”
"JPdL. Juan Ponce de Leon! Ah, that great pilot; senores, we are in
the presence of history!”
And of those there in the garden of the villa in that suburb of that
southern South American city, several look directly at the young priest
to see if he is not impressed. "Why,” he asks, "should I doubt that they
saw such initials? And why should I not doubt that they saw what had
been put there by hoaxers, or shall we say, 'jokers’? Giant tortoises may
live long, but — that long? On Santa Elena there is a great tortoise, said
to have been there in the time of Bonaparte. Said. And on Tonga, in the
Pacific, there is another one, said to have been brought there by capitan
Cooke. Said. Humanity continues to divert itself with fables, and mean-
while it continues, largely, to refuse to accept the truth. Therefore we
all suffer.” He said this with a certain intensity, low-keyed but emphatic.
Said the attorney, dressed in that meticulous black and white,
"But . . . Father Juan ... it does not follow does it, that because we
believe that certain tortoises may live to be old, very very old, surely it
does not follow that we deny the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church?” And the young priest answered, slowly, almost I would say,
reluctantly, that. No, it did not follow.
But although El Vilvoy made no further, as it were, public appearances
in the Capital and Port, he continued to be seen from time to time by
102
AVRAM DAVIDSON
visitors from there to his almost-native Island (after all, he had been
very young and small when his parents made their landing). From time
to time parties of such visitors, it depended always upon the weather,
at least, and sometimes also upon other conditions — in time of prosperity
perhaps a hit more often, in times of civil unrest certainly somewhat less
often; parties of visitors would make what one might call a cruise, one
might call it an excursion. Few indeed made the trip, which had to be
made by foot, all the way from the shore to the farm. For one thing it
was not easy, for another it was known that the senior Kielors did not
favor such visitations, interruptive of their private schedules and their
private peace; also they said that visitors brought colds. It became the
custom for one of the landing parties to fire three shots when they had
landed. And, eventually, usually while they were eating their picnic
lunches, silently out of the wilderness there would appear upton the upper
edges of the shore, El Vilvoy. What exclamations! What risings to the
feet. What, one might say, clamors. Cheers! And always, always ... or
anyway, usually, or at any rate: often . . . someone would level a camera.
"Ah, Tone,” the skipper would say, casually (imagine sp)eaking casually
to someone so remarkable.); "Tone, here are the things ordered by your
Papa, [aside! Here, you, fellow, pile them well back from the tideline.”
And so on.
Sometimes, as the visitors were returning to whichever small ship by
row-boat or by motor-launch, sometimes they looked back, El Vilvoy
raised a hand in farewell, abruptly let it fall. What a waving of hand-
kerchiefs! What cries of Luego, Vilvoy! et cetera.
But when they looked back again, always he was gone.
Full-page spread in La Voz. Headline: El Vilvoy, Does His Natural
Life Keep Him Youthful? Is it his total revulsion of the semi-artificial
foods of the civilized living which maintains the Vilvoy in his youthful-
ness? Is it the conditions so devoid of stress or pressure, in complete
harmony with the rhythms of the tides and the cycles of the Nature,
which is preventing him from showing the signs of inevitable decay? Has
his metabolism thus been slowed? Is he indeed, so to speak, un pieter-
panl Let us regard these incontestable photographical evidences . . . And
there they were, each captioned with the names of the photographer and
the date of the photograph, an entire series of pictures of el vilvoy, over
a period of I forget how many years, numbers do not settle well in my
mind. Sometimes his hair was a little shorter and sometimes a little
longer, sometimes he was wearing such and such a garment, sometimes
another: but always, always, not "usually” but always, really, the same
face. And it did not really seem that he was any older in the last one
than in the first one.
"I believe that it is the fruitarian diet,” said la doctora, emphasizing
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS 103
that this was her opinion, with slow, deep nods of her handsome head.
"I have known really remarkable results to occur with the fruitarian
diet. I would observe it myself, but my family will not allow.”
But the other senora, senora Alvarado? was of a different opinion. "It
is because he knows of a certain yerba which grows in a hidden vale
there on that island, or, some say, on another of those Islands. Twice a
year he goes there, secretly, and he eats that secret yerba. And it purifies
his blood. Once in January and once in Jime he purifies his blood with
the substance of this secret yerba. And it is that which prevents him
from the aging.”
Mrs. Phlux said, "How very selfish of him. I am sure that we would
all love to know the name of this herb! Why don’t we?”
Said the senora, "Because it is a secret one.” She said this very mildly,
conscious of no artifice herself, and she nodded two or three times, not
very deeply but somewhat less than rapidly. Clearly, to her, that was all
the explanation needed.
Said the Spanish priest, "Old Padre Lizarraga, of the Botanical Gar-
dens,” everyone nodded at this reference; afterwards I learned that it
was not that they all knew Padre Lizarraga, but that they all knew the
Botanical Gardens. Or knew o/’the Botanical Gardens. "Told me that he
had spent forty years investigating the native herbal medicaments, so
often said to be so good for this ailment and for that; and the result of
his studies was that he found that ninety-five percent of them were
purgatives.”
I felt that he expected that this statement would make some certain
effect, but none was visible. Only the usual polite nods. After a moment,
he went on. "Surely we have all heard of the Deception Theory?” And
the attorney said, "The malice of the press of Las Bonitas is almost
beyond belief. Conceive with what effort this theory must have been
compounded.”
So now I heard, if only in faintly greater detail, for the first time more
about Old Kielor’s other sons than the sole fact of their existing. Old
Kielor’s sons had been named, one after the other: Washington, Bona-
parte, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Masaryk . . . called informally, Tony,
Bony, Sony, Cony, and Max. Either History had ceased to supply Old
Kielor with Inunense Liberator Figures, or Time had changed the angle
of the telescope. Or else Old Kielor had been simply consistent, and it
was we who had underestimated Masaryk. And the Deception Theory
was, simply, that the entire Kielor family (prompted, so it was implied,
by the government of Ereguay) had conspired to deceive the visitors to
las encantadas by replacing each brother, as he grew older, with the next
youngest brother. That is, the tourists or trippers, the visitors, had only
seen the real Tony for an unnamed period of time; after that, the one
104
AVRAM DAVIDSON
who came down to the shoreline and was photographed would have been
Bony. And, when his own inevitable maturity would have become ob-
vious, the one who was introduced as El Vilvoy was actually Sony. And
so on, down through Cony and Max.
And here one heard certain other variations in the conventional legend.
Bony would make a patriotic speech. Cony performed a certain dance,
presumably of his own invention. Sony would hang from a branch of a
tree by the shoreline and swing back and forth. Max brandished a ma-
chete and demanded assurance that the party was really from Ereguay,
and not las Bonitas.
Mostly I had just looked and listened. Now I asked a question. Had
any one here ever been to Grand Encantada?
"But one does not go there anymore,” said the senora whose husband
was un burocrata. "Because it is uncomfortable the voyage, and on the
Island there is no retrete, and nowadays one has the cinema.”
The youthful stranger had rolled himself dexterously a cigarette in
what looked like a leaf of pale tobacco, and now he lit it and sat forward
in his chair, watching the smoke. It was not rank, merely somewhat
strange. I thought that perhaps it reminded me of the small puro being
smoked by the man, his face I did not see, who had brought the side of
venison to the ristorante where Diego and I had eaten the morning before
our arrival in the Ciudad. Only, perhaps I did see his face.
— But when had these visitations left off? Opinion was divided. And
how many years had separated the brothers Kielor one from the other?
No one had any idea. There were, however, any number of ideas involving
such reference-points as the Revolution of the Year of Drought, and the
Interim Presidency of the Very Sad Leap Year, and the Battle of Apostolo
Santiago: events clearly as significant to those others present as The
Bonus March or Pearl Harbor was to me; but of which we, all of us in
the Northern Continent, were but utterly ignorant. Every Latin Amer-
ican republic has its own Alamo, its own Gettysburg, and we have never
heard of any one of them. Nearer to us than to Ereguay is a country once
convulsed by a great civil war during a period which we remember chiefly
for the wearing of sleeve-garters, and funny female hats.
It was, however, where I now tarried, absolutely a matter of national
belief that on the Islas Encantadas lived El Vilvoy, who had (a) come to
the rescue of an innocent young girl, daughter of a national hero, who
was once menaced by a thug; he immediately bit off the thug’s ear, thus
causing him to flee into the night with his bleeding ear in one hand; (b)
this same wild but inestimably praiseworthy young vilvoy had upon a
subsequent occasion rescued none other but the President of the Republic
from a gang of invaders intent upon depriving Ereguay of the sovereignty
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
105
of the Islands, and (c) had cut off the heads of twenty-seven of them and
hidden the heads in a cave; and (d) he —
Mrs. Phlux said, "In a way it rather reminds me of Arthur and the
Land of Avalon, or of Barbarossa in his cavern asleep with his beard still
growing . . . and, of course, of poor young King Sebastian, who didn’t
really die in battle five hundred years ago was it? and will of course
some day return. My. I do rather like it.”
The priest. Padre Juan, had taken up his cup of chocolate, and now he
put it down again. "We have all heard,” he said, "of something which
was done in another country, which should not have been done,” and
again he took his cup, and again he put it down. And it seemed that
there was now a bit more interest displayed; could it be that people had
been just a bit restive at hearing their own legend put down, and were
now pleased to be hearing of some other nation being blamed for . . . for
what? "I refer,” said the priest, "to the Julio Castillano forgeries.” People
were being, definitely, more interested. I was certainly even more inter-
ested, for I had never heard of the matter.
"What was that?” I asked. Julio Castillano, it was explained to me,
had been a well-known journalist in Nueva Andorra; perhaps he was at
least as well known for his candid camera as for his candid commentaries.
And in a celebrated series of news articles he had supplied, I did not
learn exactly how many photographs, of a Leading Political Figure in
the company of a Leading Theatrical Artiste who was not his lawful (or
even unlawful) wife. To make the matter very short, if not indeed curt:
the photographs were revealed, exposed as we might say, as forgeries,
hoaxes ... of a sort . . . that is, they had all been taken of the two people
involved in entirely different pictures, and the clever scoundrel had some-
how joined the two together. Indeed, there was no real evidence that
they had ever been together at any time in any place. Sought by the law
and by the outraged husband of the Leading Theatrical Artiste, Julio
Castillano had fled the country for another: and there he had shot himself.
"What do you suggest, then. Father?” the attorney asked. "That the
photographs showing the vilvoy were all hoaxes? In what way?”
Padre Juan hesitated for a moment. "What proof do we have,” he asked,
"that all or most of those pictures had not been taken in the course of,
say, one or two years? with fictitious date subsequently ascribed to them?
Or what proof do we have that the dates may have not been let us say
confused?”
Asked la doctora, "But what proof do we have that they were?”
It was, he said, a deduction, a theory, not an accusation. The press was
almost ever3rwhere of a sensationalist tendency, ready to manufacture
exciting news when that happened to be in short supply. It would not
have been difficult to assemble a collection of photographs and to mis-
106
AVRAM DAVIDSON
ascribe, or even to confuse, their dates. "Thus gratifying,” he said, "the
jaded tastes of a public unnaturally eager for, always, more novelty and
more and more novelty. Even when it involves an interference in the
natural law, whereby all men are mortal, and whereby all who live an
age must become aged.”
The attorney made a gesture which foretold a comment, then for a
moment he withheld his comment. Then he said, "I believe, reverend sir,
that you wish to remind us that the Church cautions us against accepting
a miraculous explanation for anything as long as a mundane explanation
is acceptable.” He did not put it in the form of a question.
And the priest slowly nodded his agreement that this was, indeed, just
what he meant. A murmur was heard, as that of several people all saying
Mmmm at once.
While the latter part of the conversation had been going on I was
aware of a figure walking very slowly around the other end of the gardens
(it was a large garden and might very well have rightfully deserved the
plural form), but this had not been in the forefront of my mind. Presently
the figure came gradually nearer, and I saw that it was an old woman.
Whoever said that in passing through life (or however does it go?), be
sure to pause and smell the roses, would have been pleased with this
elderly person. Stopping, stooping, bending her face to the blossoms,
almost she seemed to be stroking the plants; and perhaps she was. "What
a shame you had not been here even a few years ago,” the attorney said
to me. "You would have been able to meet the former President Caspar
de la Vara, who was tragically killed whilst driving his motor car, when
he was ninety-six.” And the senora said, "Ninety-seven.”
Slowly the woman drew nearer, then slowly she wandered on away.
Eventually I formed the thought, and leaned over and asked my host,
"Who is that?” and I gestured. It was a small gesture.
He gave her only the slightest of glances, smiled (so it seemed, fondly),
and then he said to me, "That is my great-aunt Bertha. She never goes
out, and socially she sees almost no one.” Scarcely had I engaged this
answer to my question than another question formed, for the young — as
I had thought, hunter or farmer, perhaps — who had, save for occasionally
touching his very slight moustache, and smoking his cigarette, hardly
moved; he had gotten up and, walking through the lower part of the
garden, had come face to face with the old woman. She looked up as he
stood before her, and then in a rush she held out her hands, and he took
them. "Oh, Tony!” she cried. "Oh, Tony! You never grow old!” #
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
107
Well, here I am, in the stetl, gun in hand. Lurking in the alleyway,
waiting to kill my grandfather. My zeder.
Not that I have anything against the old man, you understand. Ac-
tually I hardly knew him, I was only six or seven years old when he died.
I dimly recall the tiny grimy house where he lived with my boobah, the
house where my father and his brothers and sisters had grown up. It was
a tenement really, squeezed into a row of similar houses, no bathroom
at all and the toilet out in the diminutive backyard where they kept the
chickens. It’s gone now, demolished, paved over with public housing a
few years after my grandfather’s death, his real death, or at least his
first one.
He was a tailor, my grandfather, an honest-to-god little tailor, first in
the stetl and afterwards in the new country. My father was a tailor, too,
although somewhat taller, and for a better clientele. And I myself am
a physicist, such is the nature of cultural assimilation and accommo-
dation.
I should introduce myself My name is Harold Levett. My grandfather’s
name was Avram Levi. And I am going to kill him.
We would visit him, my grandfather, in his tiny tenement house, mak-
ing the long trek out from our suburban home. And, always, he would
want to take me to the barber, an aspect of these visits that I dreaded.
I never liked going to the barber, and I especially disliked the old-time
barbers in my grandfather’s neighborhood, with their long cut-throat
razors that they would sharpen on a leather strap and use to trim the
back of your neck.
But other than that, I have nothing against the old man at all, there
is really no personal malice whatsoever in what I must do now, it is all
strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry.
Of course, he is not an old man back here but a young one, younger
even than me. Small and vigorous in his motions as he walks unsus-
pecting down the alleyway towards me, he looks nothing like my father,
who is as yet not even a gleam in his eye and will now never become
one.
Why must I kill him? Surely it is evident. I must kill him to solve the
grandfather problem.
2 .
"You’re wasting your time,” my colleagues would tell me. "Time travel
is impossible, philosophically impossible.”
Surely you are familiar with the argument: If it was possible for me
to travel in time then I could kill my own grandfather and as a result
would never be bom to travel in time and kill my grandfather . . .
"But why would I want to kill my grandfather?”
"You might do so by accident,” my colleagues would say. "If enough
people traveled in time, someone would do so sooner or later, accidentally
or deliberately. That would be a paradox, and therefore impossible.”
And yet they were wrong, my colleagues. For it is possible to travel
in time. I have already proved it. And now I will solve this absurd
grandfather problem.
3 .
I step out of the shadows and raise the gun. I fire directly at my
grandfather’s chest. It makes a large wound, which bleeds profusely. And
yet he still stands, glaring at me. I fire again and again.
"Asshole!” he shouts, in clear though heavily accented English, a lan-
guage he will not learn for another fifteen years. "Jerk! Schmuck! I
should have got the barber to cut off your prick.”
"You don’t speak English,” I say.
"I went to the Berlitz in Warsaw, what do you think?” He brushes at
the bullet wounds in his chest, which are healing up even as he speaks.
"Asshole! Your father was nothing to write home about, but you . .
"You’re dead,” I say. "I killed you. I traveled back in time and I killed
you.”
"No, you didn’t,” he says. "Asshole. Time travel is impossible. Can’t
you get that through your head? And as for trying to kill your own
grandfather . . .”
"It’s nothing personal,” I say. "It’s strictly a scientific question . . .”
"Always with the grandfathers,” he says. "Always us. Tell me, Mr. Big
Time Scientist, what’s this fixation with knocking off your zeder'? Why
not just your father? Why not? Same result, after all.”
"I didn’t . . .”
"You didn’t think of it,” he says. "And you know why not? Because it’s
too close to the bone. Oh, Oedipus, Oedipus! Haven’t you learned anything
from Freud? You want to kill your father, not your grandfather. That’s
the reason for this whole time travel rigmarole, but you can’t face up to
it. So you transfer it to your grandfather instead.”
"Now look,” I say. "I’ve had my problems with my father, sure. Who
hasn’t? But nothing that would make me want to . . .”
I stop to think for a moment.
"Wait a minute,” I say. "You’re a little tailor in a stetl in the year
1905. What do you know about Freud?”
"They teach it at the Berlitz,” he says. "Now, get out of my way, I got
to measure someone for a suit.”
"This is a set-up,” I say. "You’re not my grandfather. I bet you’re an
agent of the time patrol, sent here to convince me I’m nuts.”
"No,” he says. "You’re crazy, all right. There’s no question about that.
Now get out of my way.”
4.
In a daze I pull the lever on my belt that will reverse the tachyon field.
I feel myself falling, down through the years, back to my laboratory.
Except that when I cease falling I am lying in a bed in a white-painted
room, and a man in a white coat is staring down at me.
"Ah, Mr. Levett,” he says. "I see you’re back with us. How did it go?
Did you enjoy your little chat with your grandfather?”
I shake my head, as if to clear it. Memories begin to trickle back.
"I had a breakdown,” I say.
"Yes,” says the doctor. "You became obsessed with traveling in time.
You neglected your work, your fiance, your friends. Finally you withdrew
from the world entirely. But we’ve brought you back now.”
"How?” I ask. "It all seemed so real.”
"Hypnosis. By giving substance to your obsession, we hoped to provide
you with some insight into your behavior.”
"Yes,” I say. "You’re right. I see it now. I was mad. Completely mad.
Time travel is impossible.”
"Well,” the doctor says. "I suggest you get some rest now.”
5.
I close my eyes, but sleep does not come.
I reach for the glass of water on my night table, but I never pick it up.
A young man wearing a purple jumpsuit pops into the room out of no-
where. He is holding a strange object in his right hand, which he points
at me like a gun.
"I’m sorry to have to do this, dad,” he says. "It isn’t personal.”
"Come on,” I say. "It’s a good gag and everything, but it isn’t necessary,
you know. I’m convinced. Anyway, I’ve had enough for one day.”
"I’m here to kill you, dad,” he says. "I’ve come a long way to do it and
I’m going to do it. But like I say, it isn’t personal. In some ways you were
an okay father.”
"Bullshit it isn’t personal,” I say, irritated now. The kid is a real
schmuck, even if he is a chip off the old block. "And if we’re going to do
this number, whatever happened to killing grandpa?”
He shrugs. "This is simpler,” he says.
"Hostile little punk,” I say. "Forget it, anyway. Time travel is impos-
sible.”
"You say.” He waves the device at me.
"Wait a minute,” I say. "Can we talk about this?”
And then a burst of orange light hurtles towards me. #
AND PAY SPECIAL ATTENTK^
TO CLAUSe 13 ; ‘foil COVFRAGf
IN THf EVEN! OF DEATH DUE 10
5WCI0AL. TlMf-fRAVEUNO GRANDSONS...
IN5Uf?ANCE FRAUD
also have to cope with the
loss of something very special
1^ art: Richard Crist
THE COLOR
WINTER
by Steven Popkes
The immigrant may find much to be thankful
for in a new land, but he or she may
The air smelled of whiskey, tobacco, and rain.
He stood on the top level of the parking garage, smoking one foul
African cigarette after another and drinking from a bottle with a starry
label. The rain had already soaked through his jacket. Rivulets ran down
his back, his shoulders. It was not a warm rain, but a rain of mid-No-
vember: gusty, brittle, cold.
"I am Harry Linden,” he shouted into the wind. "I am eighty years
old. I am wet.” He chuckled. "I will die of pneumonia, maybe.” He laughed
outright and drank from the bottle.
The laugh turned into a cough, and for a long minute he couldn’t get
his breath. The cough faded, and he drained the bottle and threw it to
the street. The sound of shattering glass was lost in the rain.
The office of the Stuart Street Parking Garage was placed at the corner
of Stuart Street and Berkeley Street in downtown Boston. Two sides were
made of glass to allow the owner — Harry — to watch the street, the cars
entering and leaving, and the person in the ticket booth taking money.
He barely glanced in the booth at Jasper as he entered the office. The
chair in the office creaked and he looked up. "Sasha?” he asked.
"I was down here for the doctor anyway,” she said. She was a big,
craggy mountain of a woman. Harry saw new valleys and fissures made
when she shifted her weight. A woman of twenty or so played with the
hem of Sasha’s dress. Her face was wide and her eyes slanted, her fingers
stubby and thick. "You should watch Jasper,” Sasha continued. "Keep
an eye on him. He could take you for a whole day’s profits.” She stared
at him accusingly. "Harry Linden, you are eighty years old and you are
wet clear through. You could die of pneumonia.”
"Sasha.” He smiled and kissed her forehead. He stroked the younger
woman’s head. "And Margaret. What did the doctor say?”
Margaret smiled and covered her face with her hands, peeking out
between her fingers.
"Wet.” Sasha shook her finger at him. "And smelling of whiskey.”
He nodded and hung up his jacket in the comer. The dripping blended
with the steam hiss of the radiator.
"You listen to me about Jasper. You must watch him.”
Harry looked through the window towards the booth. Jasper stood still,
staring at nothing, waiting for a car to come. The garage was silent but
for the rain. Jasper was bald all over. His chest and upper abdomen hung
on him like empty sacks, wrinkled and covered with something not quite
hair, not quite feathers. If it weren’t for the dish-shaped skin where his
eyes should have been, he might have looked like an old bum wearing
empty sacks. As it was, the ridges and wrinkles under his skin and across
THE COLOR WINTER
113
his body made no sense to Harry. But, Harry reasoned, Jasper is an
alien. How should you understand him?
"Jasper will steal nothing. How is Margaret?” Margaret looked up at
him at the mention other name and smiled again. Harry and Sasha had
had a daughter, Barbara. She had never married and when she was
thirty-seven she had come home pregnant and silent. Two years after
Margaret was bom, Barbara died driving to work on a gray snowy morn-
ing when tbe Harvard Bridge collapsed into the Charles River. She had
been a melancholy, practical child; a strong, self-willed woman who
smiled little. Barbara was born the year Germany had invaded Poland
and died the year R’rched the Rigellian crashed in Boston harbor: when
things changed, Harry thought. As he looked at Margaret, he saw Bar-
bara’s features overlaid by Down’s Syndrome. With all of that arrayed
behind you, how is it you are so happy? Harry shook his head.
Sasha shrugged. "Bronchitis. Heart murmur. It is the same, or only
a little worse.”
"That is a small victory, anyway.”
Margaret buried her face in the folds of Sasha’s dress. She giggled.
Jasper had come that summer. Thus:
Harry looked up and saw him standing silently outside the glass door.
Harry had only looked up to see if Sasha and Margaret were coming
down the street to have lunch. He made a kind of squeak of alarm.
The alien did not move.
Harry was startled but not surprised. All week he had been hearing
of interstellar refugees coming from some far depression or war or some-
thing else the television would not describe clearly. He had already seen
a few of them on the Boston streets.
He opened the door. "How — ” His voice squeaked again. He cleared his
throat and tried once more. "How do you do. Can I help you?” You’re a
diplomat now, Harry?, he thought. Butter would not melt in your mouth.
"The name Jasper has been assigned to me. I am seeking employment,”
the alien said in a bass whisper. "I was told at the R’rched Center there
might be some at locations such as this.”
Harry shrugged. "Not here. I don’t have much. Try the Rieken System
lots down the street.”
"Rieken System?” Jasper produced a phrase book and searched it.
Harry chuckled. "Yah. They own most of the garages around here.
Except mine.”
"I do not understand. I am in need of currency. My country is invaded
and my ...” He searched the phrase book again. "Fimily. My fimily
starves.”
Harry nodded. "Yes. I understand. Try the Rieken System.”
114
STEVEN POPKES
"Please. You must help me.”
"Goddamn it!” Harry breathed deeply. Alien, he muttered to himself.
"Try th^”
"I work cheaply. I work hard and honestly. I do not sleep and need
only a small place to stay, but if you do not have that I am told I may
stay at the R’rched Center. If I do not find work soon I will be deported
and my . . . fimily will be liable for my return passage.”
Harry was silent a moment, remembering the long nightmare run
from Poland to America. "I haven’t got much to give you.”
"Much I do not need. Only a little.”
He stared at Jasper guiltily. Just what is right here? "I — No. I must
feed my own.”
Sasha and Margaret came into the garage. Sasha looked over the alien,
then questioned Harry with her eyes. He shrugged.
Margaret took the alien’s hand.
"Yes?” said Jasper.
"I’m Margaret,” she said and gave a bubbling laugh. She rubbed her
cheek against his hand. "Soft.”
The alien was silent a moment. "I have been assigned — ” He stopped,
seemed to consider her for a long time. "I am Jasper.”
At that moment, Harry changed his mind.
All of them lived in a small house in Brighton, a dingy, broken-asphalt
subsection of Boston. Jasper slept on the back porch, where they had put
in a sink and curtains. Harry deducted a small rent from Jasper’s wages
and felt guilty. Jasper did not complain.
It was close to dawn, now, and Harry sat listening to the sirens and
the pre-moming birds. The rain had stopped and the city still felt hushed.
Darkness made the shapes and shadows of things grow twisted and
strange. A 1934 Luger he had found in the Spanish Civil War glinted
an electric blue from the street light’s glare. A pair of silver candlesticks
left shadows as crooked as thumbs. Next to them was a high-domed
fireman’s helmet, the insignia written in Polish.
Sasha and Margaret were still in bed. Often, he prowled like this, to
wander the house and listen. He looked in on Margaret, her flat face
relaxed in sleep. Sasha lay still, and he could not tell if she slept or not.
He heard a noise from the kitchen, a gentle tapping or scratching.
Feeling his way through the shadows, he came to the back door. The
noise came from there. "Damn,” he muttered. He glanced at a calendar
but couldn’t see the date. It didn’t matter. He knew the date from the
sounds at the door. It was the full moon of the month: Jasper’s payday.
"Go away,” he said. "I ain’t got the money to pay you.” The scratching
continued. Harry opened the door.
THE COLOR WINTER
115
Jasper stood outside, pelt or feathers or skin moonlit and silver. "Mister
Linden?”
"Yah?”
"I wish to talk about my wages.”
Harry nodded and moved aside to let Jasper in. Mechanically, he fol-
lowed Jasper down the hall to his desk and began to bring out the check-
book.
"We do not need that tonight. Mister Linden.”
Harry looked down and tried to read Jasper’s face. It was still, wide
and noseless, broad stretches of wrinkled skin where there should have
been eyes. "Why not?”
Jasper brought out stubs of paper from within the wrinkled sacks
hanging from his body. Harry couldn’t quite see where, and wasn’t sure
he wanted to know. "Here, Mister Linden.”
Harry took them. They were the checks he had given Jasper. "There’s
three months wages here, Jasper. What did you live on?”
"I would like you to hold my wages for me. To be sent home when I
die.”
Harry sat down. "Die?” I’m too damned old. I don’t understand. I just
don’t understand.
"Yes.”
Harry waited, then sighed. "Are you going to die?”
"Yes.”
"When?”
"Not less than three years from now, I think. But not more than five.
Your planet poisons me.”
"Then why don’t you go home?”
Jasper was motionless for a moment. "I do not understand,” he said
finally.
"If our planet is killing you, why should you stay?”
"To make money. To send it home.”
"Even if you die?”
"Of course.”
Harry laughed softly. "Why not take the money home yourself?”
"When I returned there would be no money left. The return passage
would require most of it.”
Harry shrugged. "You want me to keep the money?”
"Yes.”
"What do I do when you die?”
"Send it here.” From another indefinite place on his person, Jasper
brought out a leaf of notebook paper. The page was filled with closely
written characters and numbers.
Harry couldn’t make any sense of it. "What is this?”
116
STEVEN POPKES
"It’s an address. Take it to the R’rched Center with my money and
they will send it home.”
He thrust it back towards Jasper. "Let them keep your death money.”
"They cannot.”
"Why not?”
"They do not employ me.”
"What?”
"They do not employ me.”
"I don’t understand.” Harry shook his head.
"It is important.”
Harry looked at him, then the checks. He shrugged. At least he
wouldn’t have to come up with Jasper’s check every month. "Okay.”
Jasper put the checks on the desk, turned and walked out through the
kitchen.
"Don’t you even say thanks?” Harry yelled after him.
Jasper disappeared through the door.
The Rieken System had sprung full blown from the mind of a nameless
Harvard MBA graduate working for Gulf and Western. It owned most
of the parking space in Boston and all of the really successful lots. Harry
had only been able to buy the Stuart Street Garage by a fluke years
before. The Rieken System, benign in its monopoly, had left him alone.
They called him that fall.
"Mister Linden?”
"Yah?” He wondered which of his creditors he was talking to this time.
"My name is Proong. Randar Proong. I represent the Rieken System.”
Harry sat up. This is it, he thought. His mouth grew dry. His stomach
clenched. They’ll squeeze me out, part of him said. No, he replied. I can
sell. And cover Margaret’s medical bills? You barely do that now. Maybe.
I can make breathing space. Maybe I can make some real money. Fears
and hopes bom in Poland and thought long dead now came back to life.
"Yah?”
"I’d like to meet with you. Lunch, perhaps. Or dinner. What time is
convenient?”
He held his voice low, noncommittal, nervous. "What do you want?”
"It’s better to talk face to face. Dinner on Tuesday would be good for
me. How does that sound?”
He felt confused, flustered, excited, demoralized. "Tuesday?”
"Sevenish? At the Copley? I could come over to the garage and pick
you up.”
What the hell? This isn’t Poland, remember that. "Yah. Okay. 'Tues-
day.”
"See you then.”
THE COLOR WINTER
117
The garage schedule went like this: Jasper opened at five am and
worked until closing — about midnight. He claimed he needed no sleep
and wanted to work the hours. It meant more money he could send to
his "fimily.” Harry came in about noon and worked until they closed the
garage and went home. Over the years before Jasper came, Sasha, Mar-
garet, and Harry’s life had skewed later and later, until for them evening
began at midnight. Sasha regularly went to sleep at three. Harry would
also sleep then, when he wasn’t prowling. Jasper’s coming had given
them back their mornings.
Their living room was a pale yellow oblong of light; lamps hung from
the ceilings, the mantelpiece, stood on end tables, on small stools. Tall
lamps stood next to the chairs. Sasha had a passion for light.
Sitting in a pool of brightness, Harry chewed over the conversation
with Proong. It was short. It was polite. It was noncommittal. It was just
exactly the kind of conversation he could imagine some minion of Rieken
having with a prospective victim. He had not told Sasha of the call, and
watched her and Jasper and Margaret with the morose satisfaction of
the truly depressed.
Margaret slapped at Jasper pla3dully, clumsily tried to tickle him. This
seemed to alarm Jasper, and he backed quickly away, spreading the
wrinkled sacks on his upper body into a strange umbrella-like arrange-
ment from under his arms. It was twice as wide as he was, and iridescent
as butterfly wings or the throat feathers of blackbirds. Margaret watched,
laughed, and clapped her hands.
"Pretty. What is it?”
Jasper relaxed and sat on the floor across from Margaret. They make
a world, the two of them, Harry thought. Jasper leaned towards her so
that she could see it easily. It shone with deep purples and blacks. "It’s
my ...” He stopped for a long time. "My pocket. I can breathe here. Or
eat as you do with your mouth.”
"Eat what?”
"I do not know the word. What falls from the sky? In the color winter?
When water is mostly ice.”
"Snow, Jasper,” Sasha said suddenly. She turned off the television.
"It’s called snow.”
"Snow, then. We breathe it in here. All colors of it: red, green, lavender.
It is what nourishes us most of all. The world poisons us without it.”
Harry suddenly felt the words were aimed at him. "Snow is white here,
Jasper.”
"I know. I saw pictures before I left.”
What will you do with Margaret if you sell?
118
STEVEN POPKES
ni take better care of her, he thought. I could get her better doctors.
She cannot be cured. What else can you give her?
He shrugged and looked outside the office. The wind was blustery and
cold, ripping between the Hancock Building and the garage in a long
moaning howl.
What will you do with Jasper?
He’ll be okay. The R’rched people will take care of him.
You took his money. His death money. Where is it?
He squirmed. I’ll give it to him when the time comes.
Where is it now!
You know where it is. It’s in doctor hills for Margaret. It’s in a new
pair of bifocals for Sasha. It’s in the last month’s mortgage payment on
the garage.
"Mister Linden?”
"What?” He half stood and turned, saw Jasper and eased slowly down.
"What’s the matter?”
"Nothing. It is cold in the booth. May I come in here for a few minutes?”
God. It must have been near zero outside. Rain and cold, all winter.
Nothing in between.
"Yah,” he said. "Aren’t any cars coming anyway.”
Jasper closed the door and stood silently. After a while, this made
Harry nervous. "You need anything?”
"No, sir. I am warming now.”
"Yah. Yah.” He nodded. "You do that.”
The silence fell again. To Harry, the world became soundless, anechoic,
and dumb. He felt pressured, embarrassed, needy — silence was only
something he wanted to fill. "Jasper,” he said as quick as a shout. "So.
I don’t know enough about you. So. Where are you really from?”
"A long way from here.”
"I know that, for God’s sake. I mean, what was it like! What were you
like there?”
Jasper did not move or say anything for a long moment. "I would like
not to talk about that.”
"How come?”
"I would like not to talk about that either. It is enough that I am here.
It is enough that I will send them money . . . later. It is enough that I
come to a place that — ” He stopped. He shuddered in a quick convulsion
as a dog or a mink might shake off water. "I would like not to talk about
that. Who are you, Mister Linden?”
Harry stared at Jasper. "Can you drink?”
"Just as you. We are metabolically similar.”
"No. I mean, can you drink alcohol?”
"Probably not. Do not let me stop you.”
THE COLOR WINTER
119
Harry pulled out the bottle in the desk and swallowed hard, then easy
as the fire came into his gut. "Yah,” he said finally.
"Who are you?” said the alien.
"Harry Linden. Eighty years old. Destined for pneumonia. At least,
that’s what Sasha tells me.” He shook his head, smiled. "You know how
we met?” He rushed on, not waiting for Jasper’s reply. "I was a fireman
in Krakow when I was a young man. Very young, you understand. Not
yet twenty.” He chuckled. "It was an honorable profession. Strong. Pur-
poseful. Fearless. You must be all of these.” He laughed. "So we were
sometimes weak and our bowels turned to water. Still, we knew what
needed to be done and did it. There are no small victories in such a job.
Every task is important. Life-threatening. Clear.”
Harry swallowed again. "She was watching the fire engines. With such
concentration. Such attention. It caught me. I spoke with her. Spoke with
her again. Asked her to the picture show. She came with me. We did
this often.”
He stared out the window, listening to the wind and the vibration in
the windows, listening to the wailing emptiness in the garage behind
him. "Finally, her parents said, 'this fireman is not to be our son-in-law.’
And they chose a tailor.” He shrugged. "A good man, wealthy, with his
own shop and clothing store. I knew him. Krakow was not so big to hold
only strangers. And she came to me to say good-bye.”
There was no garage anymore, no wind, only the light snowy day in
front of the cafe, its sign creaking in the breeze, the snow covering them
both.
"I said, 'Don’t marry him. Marry me.’ And she looked at me. And she
saw what I had to give her. What the tailor had to give her. That I would
go away, that the war would come between us, that she would struggle,
bear a silent unhappy child alone, be grandmother to a — ” He stopped,
breathed deeply a moment, stared into the bottle meditatively. "Then,
I only knew she saw that no piece of her life with me would be easy. We
would have a hard, difficult time. And she was right.” He shrugged. "I
looked down into the snow and made ready to say good-bye. It did not
occur to me she could see that and still wish to have me. 'All right,’ she
said to me. Just that. 'All right.’ ”
Harry did not move for a while, staring out the window at the blowing
papers, candy wrappers, leaves. He shook himself much as Jasper had
done, shrugged and drank from the bottle. "And then, of course, I had
to go and fight the fascists in Spain. We’d been married a little while by
then, and she’d become pregnant. I said to myself, 'if they will fight in
Spain, they will fight anywhere. Even here.’ And I went away to stop
them. And of course, I was captured. They took Poland before I escaped.
120
STEVEN POPKES
I did not see my daughter until she was five. She did not know who I
was.” He turned to Jasper. "That is who 1 am, alien person.”
Jasper stood and nodded — a motion he had learned from Harry. "I am
warm, now. Mister Linden. I will go back out to the booth.”
"Does any of that mean anything to you? Anything?” Harry stood at
the door and stared at the alien as he entered the booth.
Jasper stopped in the booth and turned to Harry. "It means you to me.
Mister Linden.”
"And what the hell does that mean?” Jasper closed the booth door.
"What does that mean?” Harry stood in the doorway until he grew cold,
but Jasper did not leave the booth or answer.
The Copley was the premier restaurant in Copley Place, a modem
pastel fortress dominating south downtown with a bland, pink malevol-
ence. Rosewood and brass smoothed the Copley’s edges, marble eased the
eyes, and thick carpets hushed the footsteps. It gave Harry a plush,
trapped feeling, a soft claustrophobia that brought him close to hysteria.
The finish on the silverware was brushed pewter and the tablecloth was
a dull rainy blue.
Randar Proong spoke softly as he suggested items from the menu. His
suit matched the tablecloth and carpet. He smiled genially, bright teeth
in a dark face. His nails were manicured.
"Try the sole. It is really quite good.”
Harry felt as if he were drowning.
Proong led him unresisting through appetizers, before-dinner drinks,
salad, sole, dessert, and coffee.
"What do you want?” Harry felt stuffed, dazed, no more alive than
some lizard lying in the sun.
"The Rieken System is, of course, interested in your property.” Proong
chuckled slightly, looked across the restaurant. "We would like to buy
it for a fair market value. More than you could make from it.”
"Why?”
"There’s no secret about it.” Proong placed both palms together. "The
market is low right now. The indigent aliens have been causing a move
away from the city and property values have dropped. We feel this trend
will reverse. Then, any property we purchase now we will make more
profit on later. Nothing exciting.”
"Yah.” He nodded, intoxicated on food, wine, and surroundings.
"I thought we might have a chance to chat for a bit before we begin
actual negotiations.” He leaned back and watched Harry, relaxed, con-
fident.
Harry remembered that look. The Nazis in Poland had had it. So had
the Fascists in Spain. The doctor who delivered Margaret had it, as did
THE COLOR WINTER
121
the second doctor who diagnosed Down’s Syndrome for her, condemning
her with a label.
Just what would you be selling, Harry? he asked himself. Pain? A little
heartache? So what if this empty man so easily buys you? Is that so
terrible?
"I have employees — ”
"Only one,” corrected Proong. "And an alien at that. We considered
that an interesting move on your part. A cheap investment for the time
he puts in. Especially since you don’t intend to pay him.”
"I will pay him.” Harry straightened up.
"Of course. Later. When the time comes. I understand.” Proong
shrugged. "Still, there is no legal obligation for you to do so, is there? He
is a legal alien. The law is quite strict on that point. But a legal alien
what? Animal? Pet? No rigorous definition has yet been approved. And
until it is, he has no contract and you have no legal obligation.”
"What would you do with him?” Harry stared at the tablecloth. What
more did these people know?
"A policy has not yet been worked out.” Proong studied his nails.
"Ah.” Harry finished his wine.
"Can we begin negotiations next week?” From his coat pocket, Proong
pulled a pocket calendar and studied it. "About the middle of the week
would be good for me.”
"I must think about it,” he said slowly.
"Of course.” Proong nodded. The waiter passed and Proong fielded the
check deftly. "Please inform me as soon as you can. Our funds move
quickly, and we should work out something soon. Here is my card. Shall
I call you tomorrow?”
Harry stood and nodded as Proong left. He had no idea what he should
do.
Sasha found him in the living room, sitting quietly in the blue pre-
dawn light, staring out the window. On the nightstand beside him there
was a tall unopened bottle of whiskey.
"Harry?” she asked softly.
He turned to her. "Sasha?” 'Then, saw her. "Sasha.”
She sat next to him. "What is wrong?”
He was silent a long moment, then shrugged. "I very nearly sold the
garage. For a great deal of money.” He shrugged again.
"To who? You would do this without asking me?” She leaned back and
he saw she was hurt.
"No. I would not. But I almost did.” The increasing light drew her
features into perspective for him. Under the sagging flesh and partially
122 STEVEN POPKES
blind eyes, he still saw her as she had been on that snowy day in Krakow.
"How is it you stayed with me?” he wondered aloud.
"Some question.” She shifted uncomfortably.
"Yah.” He nodded. "I almost sold the garage to the Rieken System. I
didn’t for no good reason.” He held his hands together in his lap. "I didn’t
because I was afraid if I didn’t have something holding me down, I would
fly away crazy. If I kept it, it should have been because Jasper trusted
me, or because I would have hurt Margaret by hurting Jasper. Or some
other good reason. We could have had money. I could have gotten better
doctors for Margaret. I could have taken you somewhere. We could have
had it easier.” He shook his head and pressed his hands together until
they were white. "If I didn’t, it should be for reasons worth something.
But I didn’t because I was afraid to sell.” She held him. "I wanted to do
right. Sell or not sell for the right reasons.”
After a time, he looked up at her. "How is it you stayed with me?”
She shrugged. "There was no one else I wanted.”
He stood on the roof looking down on the street, across to the mirror
windows of the Hancock. He had no whiskey with him and no cigarettes,
but the wind was still cold and biting. At least there was no rain. He
had no real thoughts. At some point, the wind died down. He did not
notice it.
He started at a touch on his face, a touch of feathers. He looked up
and saw snow coming down in fine, faint flakes. From down below he
heard, "Snow! Snow!” He went to the other side of the roof and looked
down. Margaret was clapping her hands clumsily and jumping up and
down. Jasper danced beside her, his body extended into a net of
dragonfly’s wings, moving them like bellows and singing in a deep bass
croon.
They did not see him, and he watched as they tasted the snow. #
COMING SOON: Robert Silverberg’s major new novella “We Are
For the Dark,” a new Robot story by Isaac Asimov, and big new
stories by Harlan Ellison, Somtow Sucharitkul, Lucius Shepard, Jane
Yolen, Kim Stanley Rcbinson, Cherry Wilder, Harry Turtledove, and
many, many others.
THE COLOR WINTER
123
RETROI^ISION
by Robert Frazier
art; Janet Aulisio
Robert Frazier has sold short stories
to In the Field of Fire, Amazing,
and Twilight Zone. This is his
second story to appear in lAsfm.
Anxious to reach the hospital at the hub of Rio Base, Joaquim Boaz
Cristobel hurried along the corridor of the innermost ring. He stretched
his stride to its limit, pushing past the slow-moving crowds that toured
the Brazilian colony as part of a cultural exchange program. Unable to
navigate around a group of Matis in their Amazonian tribal dress, he
pushed through them until he encountered a man who blocked his way
completely. The face was familiar, he thought — then realized abruptly
that it was his own.
Joaquim was not surprised by the mirrored wall, for the colonists
frequently used such partitions to break up the monotony of their Mar-
tian life; yet he was surprised — and shocked — by his own appearance.
He looked more aboriginal than the Matis: his black hair in dirty twists,
salt and pepper stubble on his chin, eyes shot through with a fine cap-
illary pink. He looked like shit. He felt like shit. Between extra shifts
at the lab and night hours spent with Celina at the hospital, he’d barely
slept. Christ, not at all. He brushed flat his rumpled blue lab coat, ran
his fingers through his hair. He had to look good for his mother; she’d
always demanded that.
In the next section of the ring, a corridor branched in toward the hub
complex, and Joaquim hitched a ride on an electric dolly that was de-
livering chemical tanks to the hydroponic gardens there. The hub cor-
ridor and the ground level of the hub itself were abuzz with evening
activity; the bigwigs down at the Sao Paulo shuttleport must have re-
served a big transport for the tour this time, judging by the number of
visitors. The dolly operator said the cryotanks must have cost a fortune.
She wished she had some.
A clear path to the elevators opened to his left, so Joaquim thanked
the woman with a nod and slipped off the dolly near a videoboard. A few
tourists gawked at an update on the sandstorm that had hit late that
afternoon, the reds and oranges swirling on the replays. Opposite the
elevators, Joaquim leaned for a moment against the pitted glass win-
dowall where the stars shone through. Then he took the express tube to
the top of the hub.
At the tube exit into the hospital complex, a woman stopped him and
tugged him over to where the body of a child lay slumped against a
partition. "The boy died before I could get him to the doctors, Senhor,”
she said urgently. "But you can save him.” She’d recognized Joaquim as
a mnemoniphage, spotting the brown insignia on his lapel. "Please, save
him, Senhor,” she pleaded. "He was so precious.”
Joaquim shuddered. "I am under contract to the colonial authorities,”
he said stiffly, through clenched teeth. "I can only preserve those im-
portant to the colony’s survival.”
"He’s all I have, Senhor! My husband was killed in a mining accident.”
RETROVISION 125
Joaquim shook his head blindly and walked away, pushing past the
woman, who began to wail. He empathized with her, for he’d lost his own
father to the harsh surface of Mars, but the fear in his gut paralyzed
him. He resented his duties as a mnemoniphage, hated the horde of
strangers bottled and fizzling in his skull.
He also faced a far more pressing duty.
Celina Cristobel was dying. Family tradition demanded that he pre-
serve her. But Joaquim knew that he could not.
Joaquim turned from the view of the flood-lit towers outside and stared
at his mother in the hospital bed, reading the signposts of her frailties:
the thin white hair, the purse-stringed wrinkles about her slack lips, her
shallow breathing, the big blue vein that throbbed on her neck like a
newborn butterfly pumping up its wings.
Typical, he thought. Medical techniques improved, but a goddamn
hospital bed always remained the same. This one was fundamentally the
same as the dozens of others in his total collective memory, in the ex-
periences of the mnemoniphaged individuals that trailed back in his
mind to the late twentieth century. This bed had built-in videoboards to
display spectroscoped biochemical levels and other medical data, but it
also still featured ugly chrome railings, an uncomfortable plastic mat-
tress that let the patient slide, and snow-white linen tucked tight enough
to pass military inspection.
The hospital itself presented an appearance of great order and effi-
ciency, but at heart it was no different from past facilities in Joaquim’s
memory. In spite of the high-tech gloss, the halls still smelled of anti-
septics and toilet bowl chemicals, and postcard holograms of the Martian
sunrise hung askew in the same spot in each identical room. A radio left
on for an insomniac fizzled with static, giving off faint riffs of great
composers like Philip Glass and Villa-Lobos, ground to a muzaky pablum.
Technicians pushed equipment about on rollers that were just squeaky
enough to wake only those patients in dire need of rest. Joaquim looked
to Celina’s arm where it rested on the cowling, noted a black and blue
bruise. Shit, the nurses might be as highly-trained as advertised, but
they could still botch a probe with an IV needle. All that seemed missing
was a leaky faucet, though he imagined that it also must exist here
somewhere, perhaps dripping in the dark recess where the sink retracted
beneath the bed structure.
"Jake,” his mother said. "Are you there, Jake?”
Celina spoke as if cotton filled her throat, preventing each word from
forming, leaving the component sounds of his name to rattle against
themselves. She drifted back to sleep, her mouth falling open beneath
126
ROBERT FRAZIER
a hooked nose and pale cheeks. Joaquim sighed, then repressed a shudder.
He’d look just like her someday.
"I’m here, Mamacita,” he whispered as he sat beside her.
Joaquim gazed out the tinted windows again at Mars, past the com-
pressor towers that extracted water from the carbon dioxide atmosphere
above Mangala Vallis, past the confines of the crater base. Two solar-
powered dirigibles outlined in red and blue lights were returning from
a trade mission to the canal colonies near Olympus Mens. The slug-like
ships resembled pupilless eyes set in stars and rimmed with foxfire.
Night had become a funerary mask.
They’re probably low on energy, he mused. But wasn’t everyone? He’d
been up with Celina since early evening, and he’d worked through the
previous day cycle at the labs, testing a new ice sample. He was bone-
ass weary. Plain and simple. And Celina? Her vital signs showed nothing
acute, yet something seemed to have given way inside her, a core had
collapsed, and weariness radiated through her greyed skin. Despite her
adventurous self-image as a Martian posseiro, a handy pioneer scratching
out homesteads in a vastly different kind of Amazonia, she had finally
run out of juice. Suddenly, in a vivid stab of sound and light within his
head, he was gripped by a memory from one of the first colonists, a
memory of that colonist’s frozen death down in the Big Feather channel
of Mangala Vallis. The woman’s battery pack had run down, the suit had
stiffened, and time itself had seemed to alter, slowing down until it
became fixed in stone, like the great channels carved by ancient flash-
floods along the red plain. He nodded his head. The import of this memory
of the woman’s death was not lost on him. Celina was near the end.
Joaquim leaned over to check the green needle on the battery yoke for
her LVAD heart assistant. It showed a full charge, no doubt it was
functioning perfectly within her left ventricle. He leaned back in his
metal chair, an uncomfortable thing that he’d grown so accustomed to
during his long hours here that he’d forgotten about it and imagined
himself sitting on air. He noticed the time on the LED display above the
door. His night crew at GeoLab would be getting off shift in a few minutes.
He glanced at his briefcase near the door. It contained a ton of work he’d
ignored while sitting with Celina. At Geolab, Joaquim studied plugs that
had been drilled from the Martian North Pole before it had been melted
with an orbiting mirror ... a strategy that terraformers hoped would
chain-react into a greenhouse effect. His specialty was extinction theory,
so he tested the plugs for striations of cosmic dust, signs of the cometary
swarms that pelted the solar system every twenty-six million years — a
possible factor in the mass extinctions of Earth species. His father, Paulo,
had been a groundbreaker in this field, and Joaquim preserved his store-
house of insight and knowledge.
RETROVISION
127
As he shifted in his seat, his joints popped.
He wondered why he felt so old.
He was barely twenty-one, yet he encompassed the feelings of a cen-
tenarian ... so he knew the answer even as he thought the question.
He’d inherited the mnemoniphage gene that allowed him to assimilate,
to gestaltically experience the dead. The lives of many Christobels sur-
vived within him, and they in turn — as mnemoniphages — held many
others. These ancestors spoke to him, whispering secrets that might
otherwise have died with them. They sifted through his brain like wind-
blown sand filling the cracks in the Mangala basin. His father Paulo
especially, since Joaquim continued with Paulo’s studies. Who wouldn’t
feel old?
And what secrets, he wondered, would be lost when Celina was gone,
what insight about their origins and extinctions, or their home on the
red planet?
She seemed too fragile a package to hold much . . . yet even without
her own root system of ancestors, she was a universe waiting to be
explored. Joaquim remembered what she had said once to Paulo, before
he had died in a storm accident and had been assimilated in a truly
painful mnemoniphaging for Joaquim. It was a confused memory, com-
bining his own viewpoint with the viewpoint of his father, yet the truth
of it still touched him as it had touched them both then for a bare moment.
"It’s such an easy thing for you to die,” she had said. "Because you will
live on.”
Joaquim rubbed his eyes. A numb line ran straight through his head,
above his right eye and the bridge of his nose, and his exhaustion urged
it to diffuse and spread throughout his upper torso. He felt that if he
were suddenly turned inside out, they’d find his blood and organs and
bones reduced to a thick goo. He should have been alert for his mother,
reliving their good times, yet instead he allowed a bland garble of
thoughts to branch through his head— musings on beds and hospitals,
on his work, on people past. He knew her time was short, yet he found
no strong emotion within him to counter the dull reality, no cause to
rant at the universe. Too much bad blood had existed between them in
recent years, much of it centered on his decision to continue in his father’s
footsteps. Besides his passion for science, Paulo Cristobel had been fa-
natically dedicated to his role as a public mnemoniphage; and, despite
a personal aversion, Joaquim had succumbed to political pressure and
agreed to provide the same service for Rio Base, acting as a human
library. His mother would not accept this. She grew callous toward Joa-
quim, hardened by her bitterness over the last, lonely years with Paulo.
Joaquim was wounded. He allowed the bitterness to work on him also.
128
ROBERT FRAZIER
It became increasingly difficult to separate the tender moments with a
younger Celina from the troubled, embittered moments of the present.
"Jake?” She opened her eyes and leaned her head toward his side of
the bed. "Do you have it with you?”
"Yes, Mamacita. Safe in my pocket.”
He peeled the velcros on his right shoulder sleeve and removed a small
corduroy case whose green nap had been worn smooth with decades of
use. Celina’s eyes widened for a moment, and then she succumbed to a
fit of coughing and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a
glazed look. He gripped her ankle, as if to hold her from drifting away.
"Good,” she said with a cough. "I want you to remember me with all
the others.”
There was a taunting, vicious undertone in her voice that gave her
words a chilling ring. Joaquim realized that this was her final weapon
against him, a blade of irony to be twisted in his gut. He’d have to absorb
her life into his, literally swallowing the totality of her bitterness. Then
he would see /limse//' through her eyes. He’d experience all the times she
thought he’d wronged her, from her point of view, and suffer all the
accompanying pangs of guilt that he’d experienced when he mnemoni-
phaged his father. Acids roiled in his stomach like thunderheads, spitting
lightning. He imagined the shock to his system, the dizzying double-
image shift in his awareness.
He almost told her then that he couldn’t do it.
Celina groaned and closed her eyes. He looked away, focusing on the
case in his hand. He undid the antique zipper and unfolded the two halves
in his palm. How he hated and feared the devices within. Just as Celina
did, but for different reasons.
"Tell me about them,” she pleaded. "They were your father’s most
prized possessions. The bastard.”
Joaquim looked up sharply. She had surprised him; something he had
not thought her capable of anymore, for he considered these last hours
to be inexorable — choreographed and rehearsed by the wealth of similar
memories in his mental library of death scenes. She hadn’t opened her
eyes, yet she’d known what he had done. Did she hear the minute whisper
of the brass teeth as he unzipped it? Had she undergone a heightening
of perception as she approached oblivion? As Joaquim’s father had. Paulo
Cristobel had felt like that when he lay broken in the sandstorm, his
essence draining away into the red sands. He’d sensed some underlying
rhythm, some pulse-like drumming in the storm’s heart throbbing around
him. The ebb and flow of entropy had coursed through him.
Celina interrupted his speculations.
"Please, Jake. Like you’ve described them before.”
"Sorry. It kind of gripped me there for a second. The sight of it, I mean.”
RETROVISION 129
"Ah, yes,” she said. "It always did your father. Just a glimpse of his
tools sent him back into his other selves. To his father, and his father’s
father. A backward vision. It was like a drug to him.”
Celina placed both hands on the cowling over her chest and began to
stroke the twisted arthritic fingers of one hand with those of the other,
as if folding down the curled edges of hard copy as it fed off a computer
printer. Up until this final hospitalization, she’d retained a position, at
least part-time, as an information processor for the colony’s weather
watch.
"The kit contains five things,” Joaquim began. "Two ampules of neu-
rotrans stimulator. There’s a pocket for a third, but I took that a half
hour ago at your request. There’s a circular mirror, modeled after an
outmoded surgeon’s headpiece. To illuminate the work.”
He sensed Celina’s impatience, and he found a perverse pleasure in
dragging the description out.
"There’s a battered gold tube used to suck up the necessary cells . . .”
"Jake?”
"Yes, Mama. I know. Father treasured this.”
"How silly of me. Of course you know. You really know. But do you
remember yourse//' how he’d wear it in his lapel? When the women would
say 'There goes Paulo,’ he’d puff out his chest and swagger. He looked
so handsome.” Suddenly her voice faded. She grew still. "Now the drill.”
"It’s hand-cranked, with a diamond tip. The tiny steel works are well
oiled. And the handle.” Joaquim realized that this was the part of the
description she had waited for, the part of the litany about the handle.
"On the handle,” he continued, "is a smooth round ball of hard bra-
zilwood, from great grandfather’s home in the Amazon. It is well worn,
oiled by the skin of many hands. The wood’s stained pink from . . .” he
hesitated. "The blood. Grandfather’s is part of that, as is father’s.”
She sighed, and it sounded like a small animal escaping in a flurry of
feathers, like the whir of the hummingbirds and macaws kept in the
colony’s vast aviary. Joaquim held up the drill for his own inspection.
"It’s a cranial drill, for making the incisions.”
Celina said nothing. She no longer seemed to breathe.
Joaquim held the mirror from the kit above her slack lips. No vapor
exited. He sat unmoving within the exterior silence all around him. A
bubble of grief floated within his throat, and through his head rose the
unbidden memories of a hundred other deaths.
Later, after the night nurse had attested to Celina’s brain death, he
placed his mouth upon his mother’s mouth and drew her last air. As he
held it, knowing he must hold it until his lungs throbbed and burned,
he realized how fitting it was that she had departed during the description
of the mnemoniphage tools, the simple instruments that would assure
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ROBERT FRAZIER
her of an immortality of sorts. Yet he cursed himself for yet another
wave of indecision about continuing the ritual. Was he too bitter towards
Celina, and too fearful of her memories, to really go through with mne-
moniphaging her? Perhaps this doubt was also choreographed, but he’d
expected better of himself. He shrugged in resignation, exhaled in a gasp,
and continued with the ritual.
"Celina Cristobel. By the code of the mnemoniphage I must request
permission of your surviving heirs to perform this rite.” He accepted her
silent approval and added his own. "I give permission.”
Joaquim gritted his teeth and started the drill-bit turning. He was
stubborn, a condition Celina had called "a vein of silver shot through
the soul,” yet despite this, and the patina of cool he tried to maintain
about everything he said or did, the guilt was beginning to eat at him.
A few tears forked like the traceries of a bayou along his cheeks.
He drilled into Celina’s skull and penetrated the brain. His throat
constricted as blood welled onto his fingertips and the drill’s wooden
knob.
"Here is the exit of life.” Each word escaped as slow as a gas bubble
rising through lava. "The portal. The path. The gateway of pain.”
Instead of putting the gold tube between his lips, though, and sucking
out brain tissue as the ritual demanded, he pushed the tube into the
incision in her skull, forcing tissue into the tubing. He replaced it in his
kit, along with the drill.
"Now we are mingled,” he said, though it was a lie.
At the Geolab transportation garage, on the outer ring, he filled out
triplicate forms for a rover, punching in the answers on the comptroller’s
screen. He wedged himself carefully into a "skinnie,” a pressure suit
with a flexible armor which tightly adhered over his lab coat. As he was
adjusting the neck seal the comptroller returned with a hard copy for
his signature.
"Dr. Cristobel, the purpose of your mission is listed as . . .”
"Mnemoniphaging!” His voice blared out in anger, startling him as
well as the young woman. He could not cope with bureaucracy at a time
like this. "Is there anything wrong with that?”
"Yes, well, geosurveys are the only authorized uses for these vehicles.
You should sign out a general excursion rover from the base govern-
ment.” Her black eyes narrowed in challenge. She knew that he knew
that the touring visitors had those rovers booked to the limit.
He cooled. Now he sensed that there was a grudge involved here some-
where. "Miss, this is essential to my present work as well as my future
state of . . .”
RETROVISION
131
"I understand,” she said, waving the papers at him. "But regs are
regs.”
"I have authority.” He began to heat up again. "I’m under contract by
the colonial administration.”
"Oh, I know that. You told my mother that earlier today when you
refused to help her.” The woman’s voice hissed with repressed vehemence.
"You must remember that? The young boy?”
Joaquim tensed. He now knew the extent of the game she played
against him. "For that. I’m sorry.”
"But regs are regs, right?” She smiled triumphantly.
He nodded, knowing that she’d boxed him in.
"Look,” he said. "Why don’t you call this requisition whatever you like.
Then later you can have a try for my neck over it. But I am taking the
vehicle.”
He watched surprise wash over her face, then a doubtful look as she
squinted at him, and he felt as if he’d missed something important. He
knew then that he had to get moving. Until he could get away by himself,
and resolve this crisis over Celina, his actions would become more and
more erratic, more out of control. She was still watching him. When he
snapped his helmet in place, she flipped up the visor to speak to him.
"Have it back by 0900.”
He nodded, resealed the visor and wiggled in behind the wheel of the
rover. He eased the cab bubble down and punched in the vacuum seal.
As the woman raised the inner door to the exit lock and he drove in, he
saw relief on her face. It mirrored the mix of emotions within him. He
just wanted to get away. He had a vague plan for burying the small bit
of Celina he carried with him. He’d drive out to her favorite climbing
spot near Rio Base and release it to the changing chemistry of the sands.
Joaquim steered the rover out of the lock and up the crater rim that
surrounded Rio Base. As he mounted the plain above Rio and the main
channel at Mangala, he passed two cumbersome ore caterpillars moving
down into it toward the feather channels that branched away on the
opposite side. The plain, which ended at the scarp of Mangala, was strewn
with boulders and mini-craters, and winds whipped dust about his al-
ready-pitted windshield at speeds of thirty to forty knots, a calm morning
in comparison to the three-hundred-knot intensity of the afternoon be-
fore. The sun turned the horizon into a raw wound behind the silhouettes
of volcanoes slumbering in the distance. Joaquim polarized the wind-
shield, and it was as if the whole planet had been developed in a pho-
tochemical bath: the pock-marked plains, the blast craters, the deltas
etched in bedrock, the shifting dune crescents. The world bled red on red.
At a steep cliff near the convergence of Big Feather and the main
channel, Joaquim eased the six-wheeler along the cliff edge until he
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ROBERT FRAZIER
reached Skaros. This curious wind-carved promontory had been a favorite
climbing spot for Celina, who had once been the best free-solo rockclimber
on Mars. It offered a superb overlook that rivaled the Grand Canyon or
Olduvai Gorge on Earth. Back away from the channel, he could make
out the details of Rio Base, enhanced by its growth of morning shadows.
The base looked like a series of puzzle rings, linked and buried in sand
to shield them from solar and cosmic radiation. At the center, the hub
poked up like a teed golf ball, with the hospital along its equatorial girth.
She died there, he thought.
Joaquim checked the atmosphere in the cab, undipped his left glove.
He separated the seam on the shoulder of his suit and fished inside his
lab coat, then inside the tool kit for the tube containing her brain tissue.
His hand shook as he held the tube. If he let Celina go unpreserved, then
his children and his children’s children would lose a link in their family
tree. And a key perspective on Martian life. He closed his eyes and drew
a soft blob of her brain tissue into his throat, working to produce more
saliva, swallowing. He couldn’t deny her, as he had the woman with the
boy. He closed his eyes and steeled himself against her onslaught.
Later, with the outside temperature spurting to minus 10, he adjusted
his suit environment, climbed out of the rover, and began to free-solo up
the face of Skaros. The neurotrans drug, now that it was combined with
Celina’s cortical cells, torched his nervous system. Memories began to
pop in his head like flash bulbs. He climbed faster, clawing his way up
a vertical crack until he reached a lip of rust basalt about three hundred
meters from the base of Skaros. He sat with his back pressed against the
sheer rock. There, at last, he opened his mind wide to a flood of images
that boosted the noise level in his head, adding themselves to the count-
less information bits already stored there. His scalp prickled. His ears
seemed to radiate heat. The top of his skull went numb.
Voices spoke a slush of random phrases that buzzed in an imaginary
line between his ears. Many Joaquim recognized as people he had pre-
served during his work at Rio Base, while others were kin, like his father,
whose experiences were colored with images of ancestral homes, Brazil,
its people. The ebb and flow took Joaquim along a branching and re-
branching series of lives until the drug no longer controlled the flow.
Celina’s voice burst open within him, releasing the time-delay pills of
her memories. For awhile, they dominated everything with a fresh per-
spective. Then the two sets fused and the noise rose in crescendo. He
imagined it as a vast orchestra of strange instruments that imitated the
human vocal apparatus, which then mingled with counterpointal songs.
He twitched inside his suit, a seizure of almost epileptic intensity, yet
his body responded with the trained instincts of a climber and he held
RETROVISION
133
on. A slow orgasm of sound melted through his head, topped by a familiar
call. "Ks such an easy thing to die.”
Joaquim no longer heard a bitter quality in Celina’s voice. The assim-
ilation had ended. He was no longer distanced from her by his own fears
and guilts and problems. He accepted her.
When he stretched, finally dampening the voices into a background
murmur, the sun freed itself of the mountain tops and the thin atmos-
pheric haze to illuminate Mars in full. It painted Mangala Vallis in a
seemingly-endless pastel of ochres, purples, and reds. Joaquim’s mind
seemed as clear as his view. The moment matched none among all those
he stored, yet it held an implication with meaning for them all — a look
at the role of his kind over the coming centuries.
One day, he realized, humanity would be born with its heritage in
place, with its past melded into the present in a unity as subtle as these
dawn colors. Everyone would be a mnemoniphage. Everyone would see
back to the very first of their kind, like his father, like himself. They
would all possess this strange kind of immortality. Until the cycles of
extinction rolled against them as well, and they all passed the way of
the crinoids and the coccoliths and the dinosaurs. Until then, he reasoned,
there was plenty of work to do.
Joaquim picked up a thumb-sized chunk of basalt and flipped it out
from the rock cliff, watching it fall until it shrank to nothing against
the mottled background of the channel below. He felt strength return,
overcoming his weariness. Celina was a part of this world now, part of
its legacy, and, despite the pain her memories would bring, part of him,
too. Joaquim had never considered himself truly alone, and he felt even
less so now. He picked up another wedge of rock and tossed it.
The voices within him spoke. There’s one for you, Celina.
Later, someone stopped a rover near Skaros and radioed to Joaquim
about a dustgale due that morning. For a moment he was mesmerized
by the woman’s tiny face behind the red-tinted bubble of the cab. Would
he preserve her someday? Who else would be bound with him and Celina
in the web of the future?
The woman asked if he was well, and Joaquim assured her that he
was fine. He said he’d keep in touch with the base weather watch and
be in before the storm. She started up and rolled over the rough terrain
toward where Rio spread in the distance, a hive mound surrounded by
caterpillars and insectoid dirigibles.
Joaquim turned and set himself for the slow hand and foot descent
down the rock wall to his rover. His muscles flexed within his suit.
Further within, the rhythm of his people seemed to pulse in his veins.
A musical tempest moving with an unknown yet irrevocable purpose.
Joaquim moved with it. #
134
ROBERT FRAZIER
c
o
o
>*
jQ
by Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams’s novella, "Witness,”
which was published as a segment of Wildcards I
(Bantam Books’ mosaic novel), is currently a finalist for the
1987 Nebula award. Mr. Williams has just completed
work on Angel Station, a big new novel that will be
coming out from Tor Books in the Spring of 1989./]
You can look down from your apartment and see streets full of new
automobiles, all smooth geometries that cut the air with a minimum of
fuss and are built of carbonweave fiber strong as diamond and less than
a millimeter thick. Pollution-free fuel cells provide more power than any
internal-combustion engine ever did. Driving one of those cars is as safe
as breathing.
You drive a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. Its exterior is made of steel, its
aerodynamics are strikingly similar to those of a brick, and it leaves a
trail of smoke behind. If you hit something while going fast enough, you
die.
Call it a form of protest.
Your apartment building opens like a flower over the city, a slender
alloy shaft topped by a profuse glass-walled blossom. If you look down
from your bedroom window you can see the spidery Gaussian architecture
of Fantasyland, a hyperevolved Crystal Palace where the latest tech-
nological artifacts are available for purchase to an increasingly jaded
and unsettled public. Fantasyland’s architecture swoops and soars; it
strains toward singularities, geometric infinities. You think it’s fairly
pretentious for what used to be called a shopping mall. Particularly since
the Exfoliators sometimes dump bodies in the parking lot.
Ninety degrees in the other direction, you can look out your dining
room window to see the matte-black octohedron of Neurodyne Intelgene
A.G. The building, 450 meters tall, is packed from end to end with mo-
lecular switches bathed in coolant. The total number of microscopic
switches in that volume is so huge that even when expressed in scientific
notation the figure looks absurd. You work in the nearby factory that
produces the coolant, and you’ve seen the figures. The switches multiply
and repair each other and sometimes, every few weeks or so, mutate to
more efficient forms. They absorb raw energy in the form of sunlight,
store it, transform it into things they can eat. Taken together, the
switches form an intelligence far faster, far more complex, than any
human brain.
The Neurodyne octohedron is balanced on its point. It looks as if the
slightest breeze would push it over.
The octohedron never falls. To some, that’s a problem.
The Club Danton is a place that caters to forms of protest. Political,
social, religious, philosophical — if it’s aberrant, it’s there. The strawberry
cheesecake is also good.
The club is in an old brick building under a rusting iron railroad
bridge. The bridge doesn’t connect anything anymore, and its rails dangle
off the ends of the bridge in an oxidized tangle of metal. The bridge would
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WALTER JON WILLIAMS
have been tom down long ago except that the club bought it and allowed
it to stand. They thought it gave the place atmosphere.
Over the structure looms the planar perfection of the Neurodyne oc-
tohedron. This is viewed by some as a conunent on things, as another
significant metaphor.
After finishing your four-hour shift at the underground Neurodyne
facility — ^you supervise automated machines that ship coolant to AIs — ^you
head for the Club Danton. It’s a job you’ve held for four years, ever since
the Providence Privateers let you go after two inglorious seasons. The
team managers didn’t approve of the fact you didn’t like pain. You hadn’t
been told you were supposed to.
As you drive past the octohedron, you observe that a Regressers cult,
dressed in homespun, hair and beards long, is using the building for
shelter, setting cookfires in its shadow. Neurodyne doesn’t care. The cult
can push and shove all it wants, and the octohedron still won’t fall off
its point.
You drive to the club and park under the bridge. Gustav (latest version)
sits on his customary window seat, and you wave hello. He signals you
to join him.
Gustav is a dwarf. No one has to be a dwarf these days, not unless he
wants to be, so Gustav is a dwarf by way of making a statement. He has
stunted his body as metaphor for what he believes society has done to
his soul. Gustav is a dedicated revolutionary, and wants to wean people
away from their technology.
Because he does things that are illegal, Gustav makes it hard for people
to find him. He has no fixed abode, and changes his appearance regularly.
Little molecular machines beneath his skin alter the stmcture of his
face every few days.
Molecular machines are the principal technology that Gustav wants
to wean people away from. Dedicated revolutionaries, you suspect, learn
to live with these sorts of contradictions.
You get out of the Buick and walk into the club. There are some truly
repulsive people in here, many of them having altered their appearance
to include scales, fangs, multiple eyes, and devil horns. There are giants,
dwarfs, hermaphrodites, lunatics, killers. It’s all stance, a form of protest.
All a game, even though sometimes the players die. Their lives don’t
mean much to them.
Everyone in the Club Danton is a flatliner. They’re all just about as
useful as the railroad bridge above their heads, with its short rusting
tracks leading from one precipice to another.
The curve that represents the capabilities of artificial intelligence,
FLATLINE 137
plotted against time, rises over the last two decades to a near-vertical
line, soaring right off the chart in the direction of infinity, a singularity
similar in form to those implied by the architecture of Fantasyland. If
human potential were plotted on the same graph, the resultant stuttering
line would barely nudge upward. It’s flat, as flat as the destinies of most
people on our sad and unstable planet.
Molecular machines radically increased production and efficiency.
They think faster, conceptualize better, learn from their mistakes, move
data in the wink of an eye. They are perfectly efficient: no wasted re-
sources, no pollution, no harmful side effects. They were intended to
liberate us from drudgery, boredom, and even our mortality, to unleash
hidden reserves of human potential.
For all but a few, the reserves of human potential remain hidden. A
fraction of the population — maybe two percent — possesses the imagi-
nation and ability to make use of the new technology, to use it to express
themselves, their ideals, to bring themselves to full flower.
The rest of us drowned in a sea of microscopic intelligence. We gorged
on new consumer toys till we were sick of them. Our leisure time was
dutifully employed in arts and crafts, "realizing ourselves” as the phrase
went, until we learned despair by comparing our product with the ele-
gant, efficient designs of nanotechnique. Molecular machines could re-
build our bodies, turn us into superbeings. But there is still an upper
physiological limit on brain size, on brain power. We can’t become the
human equivalent of the Neurodyne building. Our technology had out-
evolved us. We had become useless, lacking in meaning.
Religion or ideology appealed to many, but both seemed irrelevant to
the basic dilemma. Cults and gangs and terrorists proliferated: none
made much of an impression. Even the ultimate resort of the frus-
trated — full-scale war — failed. World War XVII lasted maybe six min-
utes. No one died. One side’s machines so outevolved the others that the
losers had no choice but surrender. Whichever side gives the machines
greater freedom inevitably triumphs.
The gifted two percent will fulfill the human dream, fly to the stars,
live as gods, reach an ultimate understanding of the universe. The rest
of us, the flatliners, grow more and more irrelevant. We don’t even have
the consolation of meaning anything anymore, not even to ourselves.
"Hey,” says Gustav. "It’s the jock. Mr. Neutrality.”
You sit down and order plum brandy and cheesecake. You can see the
bulge of a pistol under Gustav’s armpit. Whatever his current appear-
ance, there’s been a desperate look in his eyes lately.
Gustav changes his face but he never changes his height, which of
course makes him easier to find than he’d like to be. In the conflict
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WALTER JON WILLIAMS
between practicality and principle, principle won out. You admire Gustav
for that, although of coimse it tends to make you wary. People with
principles have a way of getting other people killed.
"Not been sleeping?” you ask.
"I need your help.”
You contemplate the plum brandy against the light. "That’s what
Ugarti said to Rick, and look where it got him.”
"Just a place to stay. Till I get a new face.”
You shrug. "Probably. But only if I know who’s after you.”
"I had a little ideological dispute last night with the Romantic Marx-
ists. They want to build Socialist Man with genetic technology. I keep
telling them that genetic technology is the problem.” He sighed. "The
debate got a little heated. I had to shoot one of them to make my point.”
"The last time I got involved in one of your disputes,” you say, "the
Exfoliators tried to fire a rocket-propelled grenade through my apartment
window. Lucky the window was evolved polarized titanium and the thing
bounced off.”
The Exfoliators are very serious people. They believe that nothing has
meaning if it’s given to you by technology. They believe that objects
acquire meaning only if the are taken, preferably by violence, from some-
one who doesn’t want to give them up. The Exfoliators, due to their
seriousness, have gone a long way toward controlling the local black
market in human-made goods.
"Don’t worry,” Gustav says. "The Romantic Marxists only use old-line
technology. They’ll probably come after me with flintlock pistols. If they
were Evolved Marxists, there might be problems.”
"Okay,” you say, sampling the cheesecake, "but if anyone blows up my
Buick, it’s your ass.”
"Giving me shelter is the least you can do for the revolution,” Gustav
says. "Since you won’t do an5d;hing else.”
"Show me something that can matter,” you say, "and I’ll do it. But
you’re not risking my neck for something that can’t possibly work. Which
is everything you’ve suggested so far.”
On stage, a woman is being auctioned off to the freaks below. She is
allowing her body and pride to be abused as a form of protest against
their (and her) general uselessness. The bidding is spirited. Even among
the jaded, sex still sells.
Gustav watches, interested. You turn away and concentrate on the
cheesecake. The proceedings do not appeal to you.
So you’re old-fashioned.
The auction concludes, and Gustav groans. "Lewis,” he says.
"Lewis bought her?” you ask, surprised.
"Lewis is coming here.”
FLATLINE
139
"Too late to leave, I suppose.”
He covers his eyes. "Too late.”
Lewis plops down in one of the vacant chairs. He wears his usual eager
grin. You try hard to conceal your dismay.
Lewis is in his middle twenties but looks ten years younger. He’s plump
and pale and has chubby chipmunk cheeks. He’s losing his hair. He’s
brilliant, so far as you can tell, but somewhere he went wrong and joined
the rest of us. He has enough smarts and imagination to become one of
the people who could really direct the new technology, live and prosper
by it, but he developed a sympathy for the underdog, and now he’s trying
to overthrow the status quo. Without any possibility of success, of course.
Each scheme has been more preposterous than the last, and he drones
on about them in excruciating, and incomprehensible, detail. The last
scheme was a plan to topple the Neurodyne octohedron into the Fanta-
syland parking lot by use of grappling hooks hanging from a hijacked
space elevator.
He takes a small vial from his pocket and puts it on the table, then
grabs one of the forks from the place settings and begins digging into
your cheesecake. "Guess what I’ve got,” he says.
You and Gustav look at each other. "Tell me,” you say.
"Victory’s ours. Prepare to take power.” He nudges the vial across the
table toward you.
"With that?” you ask.
He finishes the cheesecake, leans back in his chair, and grins. "I’ve
done it,” he says. He picks up the vial and shakes it. "Something new.
We can return to human beings control of their own destiny. Isn’t it
great?”
Gustav gives you a tired smile. "Right,” you say. "And for this I gave
up my cheesecake.”
He giggles. "You don’t believe me. Listen. I’ve really done it this time.”
He displays the vial. "Tailored microviruses.” He raised a clenched fist.
"Death to the oppressors!”
"Let me guess,” you say. "You want me to help you disperse them
where I work.”
"Of course,” he says. "How else will the plan work?”
"Better start thinking of how else, Lewis.”
Lewis is crestfallen. "You mean you won’t help me?”
Gustav lights a cigar. "Of course he won’t,” he says. "Mr. Neutrality
never helps anybody. Even when somebody sensible, like me, comes up
with a scheme that might work.”
"Oh. Right.” Lewis is undeterred. "You don’t think it’ll work. Let me
explain it to you.” He blinks up at you. "You know anything about phage
viruses?”
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WALTER JON WILLIAMS
"Oh for chrissake . . You signal for more cheesecake. You’re going
to have to raise your blood sugar before you can tolerate much more of
this.
"Viruses, see, are shaped just like little hypodermic syringes. They
have a tough protein coat that protects the nucleic acid in the middle,
and when they infect a bacterium they inject the nucleic acid through
the cell wall. They totally lose their identity as individuals. They’re un-
detectable except as genetic material, and that genetic material can
subvert the genetic programming of the host cell.”
"Now you’re going to tell me that you’ve got an invincible viral
weapon,” you say, "and that all I have to do is put some of it into the
coolant at work, and that it will destroy all the artificial intelligences
in the world.”
Lewis blinks at you. "Right,” he says. "I knew you’d do it.” Your cheese-
cake arrives. Lewis takes it from the waitress and begins to eat.
Gustav can’t take it anymore. He jams his cigar-filled face right into
Lewis’s. "Do you know how often he’s been asked that?” he demands.
"Do you know how often I’ve asked him to do that? I’ve had access to
dozens of invincible viral weapons! And not one of them was worth a shit
when it came time to use them.” Lewis, a bemused look on his face, gazes
into Gustav’s face at two inches’ range and continues to eat your cheese-
cake.
"Mine’s better,” he says. "Instead of the protein sheath, I used a double
layer of evolved aluminum only two molecules thick. When the coolant
is heated in use, the outer layer melts and frees the inner layer to find
a target and attack it.”
"You fuckhead!” Gustav roars. "You think the AIs haven’t figured out
where their greatest weakness is? You think they haven’t taken steps
to protect themselves against a weapon like yours?” He points at you.
"Embarrassed as I am to admit it, Mr. Neutrality here was right to turn
all those people down.”
"You haven’t been listening.” Lewis finishes your cheesecake. "That’s
what I meant about my sheath being only two molecules thick. The whole
virus is only five millemicrons across. The smallest real virus is twenty.
The target won’t be looking for something that small. They Can’t filter
it. Look at the projections.” He reaches into his briefcase and pulls out
a thick sheet of printouts. "Something the size of the Neurodyne build-
ing — maybe three hours, and the whole thing turns to cream cheese.”
You glance at the printouts. "Where’d you get this stuff done?”
Lewis gives you a triumphant grin. "I bought time on Neurodyne, of
course. I had to break the program up into bits, so the AI wouldn’t figure
out what I was asking it.”
"Time on Neurodyne,” you say. "That’s expensive.”
FLATLINE
141
He shrugs. "I took on a job for the Exfoliators. They wanted a new kind
of nerve gas to use on the Robin Cult. I strung ’em along for a couple
months, took their money, did this instead.” He giggles again. "Boy, are
they gonna look stupid.”
The cigar falls from Gustav’s lips. "You took money from the Exfol-
iators and didn’t do the work?”
Lewis gives a laugh. "Clever, huh?”
"You asshole!”
Which, you guess, is the last thing Lewis hears, because as Gustav
turns away to find his cigar, an Exfoliator assassin, his face altered to
look like an armor-plated dinosaur, steps up behind Lewis and takes him
apart. Literally. The weapon he uses is a handle from which extrudes
a number of carbon strands, each only molecules thick, each stiffened
with a charge of static electricity. The invisible wires move through bone
and sinew, nerve and organ, and slice Lewis into thin layers. He comes
apart like a potato cut into home fries. The chair he’s sitting in comes
apart with him.
You and Gustav, far too late, hit the floor, about the time slices of
Lewis begin to fall like leaves.
The next thing you see is the waitress staring down at the mess. "Oh,
gross!” she says. The assassin is already gone.
The vial, still intact, bounces to the floor right next to your hand.
For several days you and Gustav stare at the vial that sits on the table
in your apartment. You don’t talk about it. You try very hard to pretend
it doesn’t exist. Finally you sigh and ask Gustav (newer version) to find
you some equipment. You use the equipment to take the stuff from the
vial and put fractional amounts of it into tailored gel caps. When you go
to work next day, supervising the automated assembly line that is mak-
ing coolant for AIs all over North America, you begin dropping Lewis’s
ultimate viral weapon into every hundredth container. 'The gel caps
dissolve and release the virus.
A few days later, trouble starts. It isn’t long before the AIs figure out
the problem is and how to fight it. At Neurodyne, which is the only place
where you can access the figures, the dataflow in and out of the octo-
hedron is thrown almost twenty minutes off schedule.
'Twenty minutes: that’s longer than the last several world wars. The
biggest disruption in years.
It takes the AIs about three days to trace the troubles back to you.
Maybe the disruptions slowed them down, or maybe they just wanted to
be sure. You had cleaned up your apartment, and there was nothing to
find, so they couldn’t fire you. You just got transferred to a less sensitive
job.
142
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
You don’t mind. Now you’ve got more time to learn about virology.
You and Gustav are going into the sabotage business. He’s got the con-
tacts, and you’ve got access to the Neurodyne terminals. Lewis had the
right idea. Maybe you can improve on his basic design.
You don’t want to talk about Lewis’s death changing anything. It
wasn’t that you suddenly realized how Lewis had died for his viral
weapon, that you wanted to give meaning to his tragic life — nothing like
that. Lewis, whatever his IQ, was an idiot. He deserved what happened
to him. He asked for it.
You’ve gone into the sabotage business for reasons entirely your own.
You’ve done it to give meaning to your life.
You know that it’s not going to change the world, not going to over-
throw the structure of modem society. The Neurodyne octohedron isn’t
going to fall off its point, not for anything you’re likely to do. But what
you’re doing is more constmctive than religious cults or black markets
or despair. If nothing else you’re improving the AIs, helping them get
smarter and tougher. In that sense, maybe you’re an agent of evolution.
You’re beginning to understand why the Privateers let you go. If you
do something, you’ve got to do it all the way. With football, that includes
pain. You have to love the game in spite of pain, in spite of what it does
to you. With your new profession, the deal includes futility. You have
to love the job in spite of the fact that it may not mean anything to
anybody except you, that it may not change anything at all except the
way you look at yourself.
You’re learning to love the job. The challenge, the excitement, even
the pointlessness.
Love, you find, is a wonderful thing. 9
FLATLINE
143
No matter what the circumstances,
preparations for the arrival
of the first extraterrestrials
are certain to be fraught
with confusion and
the unpredictable
turns of j
Chapter 1
'The Day of the Two Rejections’
If I had been writing it as a novel, I would have called the chapter
about that last day in London something like "The Day of the Two
Rejections.” It was a nasty day in late December, just before the holidays.
The weather was cold, wet, and miserable — ^well, I said it was London,
didn’t I? — but everybody was in a sort of expectant holiday mood; it had
just been announced that the Olympians would be arriving no later than
the following August, and everybody was excited about that. All the taxi
drivers were busy, and so I was late for my lunch with Lidia. "How was
Manahattan?” I asked, sliding into the booth beside her and giving her
a quick kiss.
"Manahattan was very nice,” she said, pouring me a drink. Lidia was
a writer, too — ^well, they call themselves writers, the ones who follow
famous people around and write down all their gossip and jokes and put
them out as books for the amusement of the idle. That’s not really writing,
of course. There’s nothing creative about it. But it pays well, and the
research (Lidia always told me) was a lot of fun. She spent a lot of time
traveling around the celebrity circuit, which was not very good for our
romance. She watched me drink the first glass before she remembered
to ask politely, "Did you finish the book?”
"Don’t call it 'the book,’ ” I said. "Call it by its name. An Ass’s Olym-
piad. I’m going to see Marcus about it this afternoon.”
"That’s not what I’d call a great title,” she commented — Lidia was
always willing to give me her opinion on anything, when she didn’t like
it. "Really, don’t you think it’s too late to be writing another sci-rom
about the Olympians?” And then she smiled brightly and said, "I’ve got
something to say to you, Julie. Have another drink first.”
So I knew what was coming right away, and that was the first rejection.
I’d seen this scene building up. Even before she left on that last "re-
search” trip to the West I had begun to suspect that some of that early
ardor had cooled, so I wasn’t really surprised when she told me, without
any further foreplay, "I’ve met somebody else, Julie.”
I said, "I see.” I really did see, and so I poured myself a third drink
while she told me about it.
"He’s a former space pilot, Julius. He’s been to Mars and the Moon and
everywhere, and, oh, he’s such a sweet man. And he’s a champion wres-
tler, too, would you believe it? Of course, he’s still married, as it happens.
But he’s going to talk to his wife about a divorce as soon as the kids are
just a little older.”
She looked at me challengingly, waiting for me to tell her she was an
146 FREDERIK POHL
idiot. I had no intention of saying anything at all, as a matter of fact,
but just in case I had she added, "Don’t say what you’re thinking.”
"I wasn’t thinking anything,” I protested.
She sighed. "You’re taking this very well,” she told me. She sounded
as though that were a great disappointment to her. "Listen, Julius, I
didn’t plan this. Truly, you’ll always be dear to me in a special way. I
hope we can always be friends — ” I stopped listening around then.
There was plenty more in the same vein, but only the details were a
surprise. When she told me our little affair was over I took it calmly
enough. I always knew that Lidia had a weakness for the more athletic
t5T)e. Worse than that, she never respected the kind of writing I do,
anyway. She had the usual establishment contempt for science-adventure
romances about the future and adventures on alien planets, and what
sort of relationship could that be, in the long run?
So I left her with a kiss and a smile, neither of them very sincere, and
headed for my editor’s office. That was where I got the second rejection.
The one that really hurt.
Mark’s office was in the old part of London, down by the river. It’s an
old company, in an old building, and most of the staff are old, too. When
the company needs clerks or copy editors it has a habit of picking up
tutors whose students have grown up and don’t need them any more and
retraining them. Of course, that’s just for the people in the lower echelons.
The higher-ups, like Mark himself, are free, salaried executives, with
the executive privilege of interminable, winey author-and-editor lunches
that don’t end until the middle of the afternoon.
I had to wait half an hour to see him; obviously he had been having
one of those lunches that day. I didn’t mind. I had every confidence that
our interview was going to be short, pleasant and remunerative. I knew
very well that An Ass’s Olympiad was one of the best sci-roms I had ever
done. Even the title was clever. The book was a satire, with classical
overtones — from The Golden Ass of the ancient writer, Lucius Apuleius,
two thousand years ago or so; I had played off the classic in a comic,
adventurous little story about the coming of the real Olympians. I can
always tell when a book is going really well and I knew the fans would
eat this one up. . . .
When I finally got in to see Marcus he had a glassy, after-lunch look
in his eye, and I could see my manuscript on his desk.
I also saw that clipped to it was a red-bordered certificate, and that
was the first warning of bad news. The certificate was the censor’s verdict,
and the red border meant it was an obstat.
Mark didn’t keep me in suspense. "We can’t publish,” he said, pressing
his palm on the manuscript. "The censors have turned it down.”
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
147
"They can’t!” I cried, making his old secretary lift his head from his
desk in the comer of the room to stare at me.
"They did,” Mark said. "I’ll read you what the obstat says: ' — of a
nature which may give offense to the delegation from the Galactic Con-
sortium, usually referred to as the Olympians — ’ and ' — thus endangering
the security and tranquility of the Empire — ’ and, well, basically it just
says no. No revisions suggested. Just a complete veto; it’s waste paper
now, Julie. Forget it.”
"But everybody is writing about the Olympians!” I yelped.
"Everybody was,” he corrected. "Now they’re getting close, and the
censors don’t want to take any more chances.” He leaned back to mb his
eyes, obviously wishing he could be taking a nice nap instead of breaking
my heart. Then he added tiredly, "So what do you want to do, Julie?
Write us a replacement? It would have to be fast, you understand; the
front office doesn’t like having contracts outstanding for more than thirty
days after due date. And it would have to be good. You’re not going to
get away with pulling some old reject out of your tmnk — I’ve seen all
those already, anyway.”
"How the hells do you expect me to write a whole new book in thirty
days?” I demanded.
He shmgged, looking sleepier and less interested in my problem than
ever. "If you can’t, you can’t. Then you’ll just have to give back the
advance,” he told me.
I calmed down fast. "Well, no,” I said, "there’s no question of having
to do that. I don’t know about finishing it in thirty days, though — ”
"I do,” he said flatly. He watched me shmg. "Have you got an idea for
the new one?”
"Mark,” I said patiently, "I’ve always got ideas for new ones. That’s
what a professional writer is. He’s a machine for thinking up ideas. I
always have more ideas than I can ever write — ”
"Do you?” he insisted.
I surrendered, because if I’d said yes the next thing would have been
that he’d want me to tell him what it was. "Not exactly,” I admitted.
"Then,” he said, "you’d better go wherever you go to get ideas, because,
give us the new book or give us back the advance, thirty days is all you’ve
got.”
There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with
those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-
copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then
they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t
148
FREDERIK POHL
get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any
more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will
escort you to debtors’ prison.
So I took his advice. I knew where to go for ideas, and it wasn’t in
London. No sensible man stays in London in the winter anyway, because
of the weather and because it’s too full of foreigners. I still can’t get used
to seeing all those huge, rustic Northmen and dark Hindian and Arabian
women in the heart of town. I admit I can be turned on by that red caste
mark or by a pair of flashing dark eyes shining through all the robes
and veils — I suppose what you imagine is always more exciting than
what you can see, especially when what you see is the short, dumpy
Britian women like Lidia.
So I made a reservation on the overnight train to Rome, to transfer
there to a hydrofoil for Alexandria. I packed with a good heart, not
neglecting to take along a floppy sun hat, a flask of insect repellent
and — oh, of course — stylus and blank tablets enough to last me for the
whole trip, just in case a book idea emerged for me to write. Egypt! Where
the world conference on the Olympians was starting its winter ses-
sion . . . where I would be among the scientists and astronauts who al-
ways sparked ideas for new science-adventure romances for me to
write . . . where it would be warm. . . .
Where my publisher’s aediles would have trouble finding me, in the
event that no idea for a new novel came along.
Chapter 2
On the Way to the Idea Place
No idea did.
That was disappointing. I do some of my best writing on trains, aircraft,
and ships, because there aren’t any interruptions and you can’t decide
to go out for a walk because there isn’t any place to walk to. It didn’t
work this time. All the while the train was slithering across the wet,
bare English winter countryside toward the Channel, I sat with my tablet
in front of me and the stylus poised to write, but by the time we dipped
into the tunnel the tablet was still virgin.
I couldn’t fool myself I was stuck. I mean, stuck. Nothing happened
in my head that could transform itself into an opening scene for a new
sci-rom novel.
It wasn’t the first time in my writing career that I’d been stuck with
the writer’s block. That’s a sort of occupational disease for any writer.
But this time was the worst. I’d really counted on An Ass’s Olympiad.
I had even calculated that the publication date could be made to coincide
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
149
with that wonderful day when the Olympians themselves arrived in our
solar system, with all sorts of wonderful publicity for my book flowing
out of that great event, so the sales should be immense . . . and, worse
than that. I’d already spent the on-signing advance. All I had left was
credit, and not much of that.
Not for the first time, I wondered what it would have been like if I had
followed some other career. If I’d stayed in the Civil Service, for instance,
as my father had wanted.
Really, I hadn’t had much choice. I was bom during the Space Tricen-
tennial Year, and my mother told me the first word I said was "Mars.”
She said there was a little misunderstanding there, because at first she
thought I was talking about the god, not the planet, and she and my
father had long talks about whether to train me for the priesthood, but
by the time I could read she knew I was a space nut. Like a lot of my
generation (the ones that read my books), I grew up on spaceflight. I was
a teenager when the first pictures came back from the space probe to the
Alpha Centauri planet Julia, with its crystal glasses and silver-leafed
trees. As a boy I corresponded with another youth who lived in the cavern
colonies on the Moon, and I read with delight the shoot-’em-ups about
outlaws and aediles chasing each other around the satellites of Jupiter.
I wasn’t the only kid who grew up space-happy, but I never got over it.
Naturally I became a science-adventure romance writer; what else did
I know anything about? As soon as I began to get actual money for my
fantasies I quit my job as secretary to one of the imperial legates on the
Western continents and went full-time pro.
I prospered at it, too — ^prospered reasonably, at least — ^well, to be more
exact, I earned a livable, if irregular, income out of the two sci-roms a
year I could manage to write, and enough of a surplus to support the
habit of dating pretty women like Lidia out of the occasional bonus when
one of the books was made into a broadcast drama or a play.
Then along came the message from the Olympians, and the whole face
of science-adventure romances was changed forever.
It was the most exciting news in the history of the world, of course.
'There really were other intelligent races out there among the stars of
the Galaxy! It had never occiured to me that it would affect me person-
ally, except with joy.
Joy it was, at first. I managed to talk my way into the Alpine radio
observatory that had recorded that first message, and I heard it recorded
with my own ears;
Dit squah dit.
Dit squee dit squah dit dit.
Dit squee dit squee dit squah dit dit dit.
150
FREDERIK POHL
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah wooooo.
Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah dit dit dit dit dit.
It all looks so simple now, but it took a while before anyone figured
out just what this first message from the Olympians was. (Of course, we
didn’t call them "Olympians” then. We wouldn’t call them that now if
the priests had anything to say about it, because they think it’s almost
sacrilegious, but what else are you going to call godlike beings from the
heavens? The name caught on right away, and the priests just had to
learn to live with it.) It was, in fact, my good friend Flavius Samuelus
ben Samuelus who first deciphered it and produced the right answer to
transmit back to the senders — the one that, four years later, let the
Olympians know we had heard them.
Meanwhile, we all knew this wonderful new truth: We weren’t edone
in the universe! Excitement exploded. The market for sci-roms boomed.
My very next book was The Radio Gods, and it sold its head off.
I thought it would go on forever.
It might have, too ... if it hadn’t been for the timorous censors.
I slept through the tunnel — all the tunnels, even the ones through the
Alps — and by tbe tirtie I woke up we were halfway down to Rome.
In spite of the fact that the tablets remained obstinately blank, I felt
more cheerful. Lidia was just a fading memory, I still had twenty-nine
days to turn in a new sci-rom and Rome, after all, is still Rome! The
center of the universe — well, not counting what new lessons in astro-
nomical geography the Olympians might teach us. At least, it’s the great-
est city in the world. It’s the place where all the action is.
By the time I’d sent the porter for breakfast and changed into a clean
robe we were there, and I alighted into the great, noisy train shed.
I hadn’t been in the city for several years, but Rome doesn’t change
much. The Tiber still stank. The big new apartment buildings still hid
the old ruins until you were almost on top of them, the flies were still
awful and the Roman youths still clustered around the train station to
sell you guided tours to the Golden House (as though any of them could
ever get past the Legion guards!), or sacred amulets, or their sisters.
Because I used to be a secretary on the staff of the Proconsul to the
Cherokee Nation I have friends in Rome. Because I hadn’t had the good
sense to call ahead, none of them were home. I had no choice. I had to
take a room in a high-rise inn on the Palatine.
It was ferociously expensive, of course. Ever3d;hing in Rome is — ^that’s
why people like me live in dreary outposts like London — ^but I figured
that by the time the bills came in I would either have found something
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
151
to satisfy Marcus and get the rest of the advance, or I’d be in so much
trouble a few extra debts wouldn’t matter.
Having reached that decision, I decided to treat myself to a servant.
I picked out a grinning, muscular Sicilian at the rental desk in the lobby,
gave him the keys for my luggage and instructed him to take it to my
room — and to make me a reservation for the next day’s hoverflight to
Alexandria.
That’s when my luck began to get better.
When the Sicilian came to the wineshop to ask me for further orders
he reported, "There’s another citizen who’s booked on the same flight.
Citizen Julius. Would you like to share a compartment with him?”
It’s nice when you rent a servant who tries to save you money. I said
approvingly, "What kind of a person is he? I don’t want to get stuck with
some real bore.”
"You can see for yourself, Julius. He’s in the baths right now. He’s a
Judaean. His name is Flavius Samuelus.”
Five minutes later I had my clothes off and a sheet wrapped around
me, and I was in the tepidarium, peering around at every body there.
I picked Sam out at once. He was stretched out with his eyes closed
while a masseur pummeled his fat old flesh. I climbed onto the slab next
to his without speaking. When he groaned and rolled over, opening his
eyes, I said, "Hello, Sam.”
It took him a moment to recognize me; he didn’t have his glasses in.
But when he squinted hard enough his face broke out into a grin. "Julie!”
he cried. "Small world! It’s good to see you again!”
And he reached out to clasp flsts-over-elbows, really welcoming, just
as I had expected; because one of the things I like best about Flavius
Samuelus is that he likes me.
One of the other things I like best about Sam is that, although he is
a competitor, he is also an undepletable natural resource. He writes sci-
roms himself. He does more than that. He has helped me with the science
part of my own sci-roms any number of times, and it had crossed my
mind as soon as I heard the Sicilian say his name that he might be just
what I wanted in the present emergency.
Sam is at least seventy years old. His head is hairless. There’s a huge,
brown age spot on the top of his scalp. His throat hangs in a pouch of
flesh, and his eyelids sag. But you’d never guess any of that if you were
simply talking to him on the phone. He has the quick, chirpy voice of a
twenty-year-old, and the mind of one, too — of an extraordinarily bright
twenty-year-old. He gets enthusiastic.
That complicates things, because Sam’s brain works faster than it
ought to. Sometimes that makes him hard to talk to, because he’s usually
152
FREDERIK POHL
three or four exchanges ahead of most people. So the next thing he says
to you is as likely as not to be the response to some question that you
are inevitably going to ask, but haven’t yet thought of.
It is an unpleasant fact of life that Sam’s sci-roms sell better than mine
do. It is a tribute to Sam’s personality that I don’t hate him for it. He
has an unfair advantage over the rest of us, since he is a professional
astronomer himself. He only writes sci-roms for fun, in his spare time,
of which he doesn’t have a whole lot. Most of his working hours are spent
running a space probe of his own, the one that circles the Epsilon Eridani
planet, Dione. I can stand his success (and, admit it!, his talent) because
he is generous with his ideas. As soon as we had agreed to share the
hoverflight compartment I put it to him directly. Well, almost directly;
I said, "Sam, I’ve been wondering about something. When the Olympians
get here, what is it going to mean to us?”
He was the right person to ask, of course; Sam knew more about the
Olympians than anyone alive. But he was the wrong person to expect
a direct answer from. He rose up, clutching his robe around him. He
waved away the masseur and looked at me in friendly amusement, out
of those bright black eyes under the flyaway eyebrows and the drooping
lids. "Why, do you need a new sci-rom plot right now?” he asked.
"Hells,” I said ruefully, and decided to come clean. "It wouldn’t be the
first time I asked you, Sam. Only this time I really need it.” And I told
him the story of the novel the censors obstatted and the editor who was
after a quick replacement — or my blood, choice of one.
He nibbled thoughtfully at the knuckle of his thumb. "What was this
novel of yours about?” he asked curiously.
"It was a satire, Sam. An Ass’s Olympiad. About the Olympians coming
down to Earth in a matter transporter, only there’s a mixup in the
transmission and one of them accidentally gets turned into an ass. It’s
got some funny bits in it.”
"It sure has, Julie. Has had for a couple dozen centuries.”
"Well, I didn’t say it was altogether original, only — ”
He was shaking his head. "I thought you were smarter than that, Julie.
What did you expect the censors to do, jeopardize the most important
event in human history for the sake of a dumb sci-rom?”
"It’s not a dumb — ”
"It’s dumb to risk offending them,” he said, overruling me firmly. "Best
to be safe and not write about them at all.”
"But everybody’s been doing it!”
"Nobody’s been turning them into asses,” he pointed out. "Julie, there’s
a limit to sci-rom speculation. When you write about the Olympians
you’re right up at that limit. Any speculation about them can be enough
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
153
reason for them to pull out of the meeting entirely, and we might never
get a chance like this again.”
"They wouldn’t — ”
"Ah, Julie,” he said, disgusted, "you don’t have any idea what they
would or wouldn’t do. The censors made the right decision. Who knows
what the Olympians are going to he like?”
"You do,” I told him.
He laughed. There was an uneasy sound to it, though. "I wish I did.
About the only thing we do know is that they don’t appear to just any
old intelligent race; they have moral standards. We don’t have any idea
what those standards are, really. I don’t know what your book says, but
maybe you speculated that the Olympians were bringing us all kinds of
new things — a cure for cancer, new psychedelic drugs, even eternal life — ”
"What kind of psychedelic drugs might they bring, exactly?” I asked.
"Down, boy! I’m telling you not to think about that kind of idea. The
point is that whatever you imagined might easily turn out to be the most
repulsive and immoral thing the Olympians can think of. The stakes are
too high. This is a once-only chance. We can’t let it go sour.”
"But I need a story,” I wailed.
"Well, yes,” he admitted, "I suppose you do. Let me think about it.
Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”
While we were in the hot drench, while we were dressing, while we
were eating a light lunch, Sam chattered on about the forthcoming con-
ference in Alexandria. I was pleased to listen. Apart from the fact that
everything he said was interesting, I began to feel hopeful about actually
producing a book for Mark. If anybody could help me, Sam could, and
he was a problem addict. He couldn’t resist a challenge.
That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’
interminably repeated squees and squahs. If you simply took the "dit”
to be "1”, and the squee to be " + ” and the squah to be " = ”, then
Dit squee dit squah dit dit
simply came out as
1 -I- 1 = 2
That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super-brain like Sam’s to sub-
stitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arith-
metic — except for the mysterious "wooooo”:
dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah wooooo.
What was the "wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to
represent the number 4?
Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he
telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:
154
FREDERIK POHL
"The message calls for an answer. 'Wooooo’ means question mark. The
answer is 4.”
And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way:
dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squah dit dit dit dit.
The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance exami-
nation, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.
It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they
weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves,
sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away,
because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space
where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.
By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that
the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they
wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before
we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the
collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of math-
ematical formulae, and then simple word relationships, to start sending
something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to
wherever they were and back with an answer.
Sam wasn’t the only one, of course. He wasn’t even the principal in-
vestigator when we got into the hard work of developing a common
vocabulary. There were better specialists than Sam at linguistics and
cryptanalysis.
But it was Sam who first noticed, early on, that the response time to
our messages was getting shorter. Meaning that the Olympians were on
their way toward us.
By then they’d begun sending picture mosaics. They came in as strings
of dits and dahs, 550,564 bits long. Someone quickly figured out that
that was the square of 742, and when they displayed the string as a
square matrix, black cells for the dits and white ones for the dahs, the
image of the first Olympian leaped out.
Everybody remembers that picture. Everyone on Earth saw it, except
for the totally blind — it was on every broadcast screen and news journal
in the world — and even the blind listened to the anatomical descriptions
every commentator supplied. 'Two tails. A fleshy, beardlike thing that
hung down from its chin. Four legs. A ruff of spikes down what seemed
to be the backbone. Eyes set wide apart on bulges from the cheekbones.
That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien.
When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam
who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same
being. The Olympians took 41 pictures to give us the complete likeness
of that first one in the round. . . .
Then they began sending pictures of the others.
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155
It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be
dealing not with one super-race, but with at least twenty-two of them.
There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier
and more strange than the one before.
That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them "Olym-
pians.” We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked
anything like any of those, and some of the older priests never stopped
muttering about blasphemy.
Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask
of wine Sam broke off his description of the latest communique from the
Olympians — ^they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions
about Earthly history — to lift his head and grin at me.
"Got it,” he said.
I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of
attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the
pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because — well,
I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well
developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it — because she
was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave.
That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave
women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this
one.
"Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.
"Of course I am. What have you got?”
"I’ve got the answer to your problem,” he beamed. "Not just a sci-rom
novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book
about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”
I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other
half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow
what comes out of it. "I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the
Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them
doing it?”
"No, no,” he snapped. "Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out
entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”
The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was
conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity. "Sam, that’s not
my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just
as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least
possible.”
"Julie, get your mind off your gonads — ” so he hadn’t missed the at-
tention I was giving the girl " — and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours.
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FREDERIK POHL
I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative
future, if you see what I mean.”
I didn’t see at all. "What’s an 'alternative future’?”
"It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. "Like if the
Olympians don’t come to see us.”
I shook my head, puzzled. "But we already know they’re coming,” I
pointed out.
"But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years
ago.
"But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the
subject. He only sighed.
"I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around
him and getting to his feet. "Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some
messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”
Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the Kievan
waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well,
I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out
working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more
interest in one of my lineage —
I’d better explain about that.
You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say that we are
descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.
I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when
I’ve been drinking — I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always
a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After
all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have
been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact
that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him,
none of them happened to be bom to a woman he happened to be married
to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Northman or
two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable
Roman ever was.
Still, even if I’m not exactly the lawful heir to the divine Julius, I at
least come of a pretty ancient and distinguished line. You would have
thought a mere waitress would have taken that into account before tium-
ing me down.
She hadn’t, though. When I woke up the next morning — alone — Sam
was gone from the inn, although the skip-ship for Alexandria wasn’t due
to sail until late evening.
I didn’t see him all day. I didn’t look for him very hard, because I woke
up feeling a little ashamed of myself Why should a grown man, a cel-
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
157
ebrated author of more than forty best-selling (well, reasonably well-
selling) sci-roms, depend on somebody else for his ideas?
So I turned my baggage over to the servant, checked out of the inn
and took the underground to the Library of Rome.
Rome isn’t only the imperial capital of the world, it’s the scientific
capital, too. The big old telescopes out on the hills aren’t much use any
more, because the lights from the city spoil their night viewing, and
anyway the big optical telescopes are all out in space now. Still, they
were where Galileus detected the first extra-solar planet and Tychus
made his famous spectrographs of the last great supernova in our own
galaxy, only a couple of dozen years after the first spaceflight. The sci-
entific tradition survives. Rome is still the headquarters of the Collegium
of Sciences.
That’s why the Library of Rome is so great for someone like me. They
have direct access to the Collegium database, and you don’t even have
to pay transmission tolls. I signed myself in, laid out my tablets and
stylus on the desk they assigned me and began calling up files.
Somewhere there had to be an idea for a science-adventure romance
no one had written yet. . . .
Somewhere there no doubt was, but I couldn’t find it. Usually you can
get a lot of help from a smart research librarian, but it seemed they’d
put on a lot of new people in the Library of Rome — Iberians, mostly;
reduced to slave status because they’d taken part in last year’s Lusitanian
uprising. There were so many Iberians on the market for a while that
they depressed the price. I would have bought some as a speculation,
knowing that the price would go up — after all, there aren’t that many
uprisings and the demand for slaves never stops. But I was temporarily
short of capital, and besides you have to feed them. If the ones at the
Library of Rome were a fair sample, they were no bargains anyway.
I gave up. The weather had improved enough to make a stroll around
town attractive, and so I wandered toward the Ostia monorail.
Rome was busy, as always. There was a bullfight going on in the
Coliseum and racing at the Circus Maximus. Tourist buses were januning
the narrow streets. A long religious procession was circling the Pantheon,
but I didn’t get close enough to see which particular gods were being
honored today. I don’t like crowds. Especially Roman crowds, because
there are even more foreigners in Rome than in London, Africa and
Hinds, Hans, and Northmen — every race on the face of the Earth sends
its tourists to visit the Imperial City. And Rome obliges with spectacles.
I paused at one of them, for the changing of the guard at the Golden
House. Of course, the Caesar and his wife were nowhere to be seen — off
on one of their endless ceremonial tours of the dominions, no doubt, or
at least opening a new supermarket somewhere. But the Algonkian fam-
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FREDERIK POHL
ily standing in front of me were thrilled as the honor Legions marched
and countermarched their standards around the palace. I remembered
enough Cherokee to ask the Algonkians where they were from, but the
languages aren’t really very close and the man’s Cherokee was even
worse than mine. We just smiled at each other.
As soon as the Legions were out of the way I headed for the train.
I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been worrying about
my financial position. The clock was running on my thirty days of grace.
I didn’t, though. I was buoyed up by a feeling of confidence. Confidence
in my good friend Flavius Samuelus who, I knew — no matter what he
was doing with most of his brain — was still cogitating an idea for me
with some part of it.
It did not occur to me that even Sam had limitations. Or that something
so much more important than my own problems was taking up his at-
tention that he didn’t have much left for me.
I didn’t see Sam come onto the skip-ship, and I didn’t see him in our
compartment. Even when the ship’s fans began to rumble and we slid
down the ways into the Tyrrheni£m Sea he wasn’t there. I dozed off,
beginning to worry that he might have missed the boat; but late that
night, already asleep, I half woke, just long enough to hear him stumbling
in. "I’ve been on the bridge,’’ he said when I muttered something. "Go
back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was
up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly,
and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine.
Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in
the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was
doing there the steward could not say.
I spent the morning relsucing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the
sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover any more. We had transited the
Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean,
the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts and extended
the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles
an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were
twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave
action to bounce us around.
Lying on my back and squinting up at the warm southern sky, I could
see a three-winged airliner rise up from the horizon behind us and grad-
ually overtake us, to disappear ahead of our bows. The plane wasn’t going
much faster than we were — and we had all the comfort, while they were
paying twice as much for passage.
I opened my eyes all the way when I caught a glimpse of someone
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS 159
standing beside me. In fact, I sat up quickly, because it was Sam. He
looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep, and he was holding his floppy
sunhat with one hand against the wind of our passage. "Where’ve you
been?” I asked.
"Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked. I shook my head.
"The transmissions from the Olympians have stopped,” he told me.
I opened my eyes really wide at that, because it was an unpleasant
surprise. Still, Sam didn’t seem that upset. Displeased, yes. Maybe even
a little concerned, but not as shaken up as I was prepared to feel. "It’s
probably nothing,” he said. "It could be just interference from the Sun.
It’s in Sagittarius now, so it’s pretty much between us and them. There’s
been trouble with static for a couple of days now.”
I ventured, "So the transmissions will start up again pretty soon?”
He shrugged and waved to the deck steward for one of those hot de-
coctions Judaeans like. When he spoke it was on a different topic. "I
don’t think I made you understand what I meant yesterday,” he said.
"Let me see if I can explain what I meant by an alternate world. You
remember your history? How Fornius Velio conquered the Mayans and
Romanized the Western Continents six or seven hundred years ago?
Well, suppose he hadn’t.”
"But he did, Sam.”
"I know he did,” Sam said patiently. "I’m saying suppose. Suppose the
Legions had been defeated at the battle of Tehultapec.”
I laughed. I was sure he was joking. "The Legions? Defeated? But the
Legions have never been defeated.”
"That’s not true,” Sam said in reproof. He hates it when people don’t
get their facts straight. "Remember Varus.”
"Oh, hells, Sam, that was ancient history! When was it, two thousand
years ago? In the time of Augustus Caesar? And it was only a temporary
defeat, anyway. The Emperor Drusus got the eagles back.” And got all
of Gaul for the Empire, too. That was one of the first big trans-Alpine
conquests. The Gauls are about as Roman as you can get these days,
especially when it comes to drinking wine.
He shook his head. "Suppose Fornius Velio had had a 'temporary’
defeat, then.”
I tried to follow his argument, but it wasn’t easy. "What difference
would that have made? Sooner or later the Legions would have con-
quered. They always have, you know.”
"That’s true,” he said reasonably, "but if that particular conquest
hadn’t happened then, the whole course of history would have been dif-
ferent. We wouldn’t have had the great westward migrations to fill up
those empty continents. The Hans and the Hinds wouldn’t have been
surrounded on both sides, so they might still be independent nations. It
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FREDERIK POHL
would have been a different world. Do you see what I’m driving at? That’s
what I mean by an 'alternate world’ — one that might have happened, but
didn’t.”
I tried to be polite to him. "Sam,” I said, "you’ve just described the
difference between a sci-rom and a fantasy. I don’t do fantasy. Besides,”
I went on, not wanting to hurt his feelings, "I don’t see how different
things would have been, really. I can’t believe the world would be changed
enough to build a sci-rom plot on.”
He gazed blankly at me for a moment, then turned and looked out to
sea. Then, without transition, he said, "There’s one funny thing. The
Martian colonies aren’t getting a transmission, either. And they aren’t
occluded by the Sun.”
I frowned. "What does that mean, Sam?”
He shook his head. "I wish I knew,” he said.
Chapter 3
In Old Alexandria
The Pharos was bright in the sunset light as we came into the port of
Alexandria. We were on hover again, at slow speeds, and the chop at the
breakwater bumped us around. But once we got to the inner harbor the
water was calm.
Sam had spent the afternoon back in the captain’s quarters, keeping
in contact with the Collegium of Sciences, but he showed up as we moored.
He saw me gazing toward the rental desk on the dock but shook his head.
"Don’t bother with a rental, Julie,” he ordered. "Let my niece’s servants
take your baggage. We’re staying with her.”
That was good news. Inn rooms in Alexandria are almost as pricey as
Rome’s. I thanked him, but he didn’t even listen. He turned our bags
over to a porter from his niece’s domicile, a little Arabian who was a lot
stronger than he looked, and disappeared toward the Hall of the Eg 3 fptian
Senate-Inferior, where the conference was going to be held.
I hailed a three-wheeler and gave the driver the address of Sam’s niece.
No matter what the Egyptians think, Alexandria is a dirty little town.
The Choctaws have a bigger capital, and the Kievans have a cleaner one.
Also Alexandria’s famous library is a joke. After my (one would like to
believe) ancestor Julius Caesar let it bum to the ground, the Egyptians
did build it up again. But it is so old-fashioned that there’s nothing in
it but books.
The home of Sam’s niece was in a particularly run-down section of that
run-down town, only a few streets from the harborside. You could hear
the noise of the cargo winches from the docks, but you couldn’t hear them
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
161
very well because of the noise of the streets themselves, thick with goods
vans and drivers cursing each other as they jockeyed around the narrow
corners. The house itself was bigger than I had expected. But, at least
from the outside, that was all you could say for it. It was faced with
cheap Egyptian stucco rather than marble, and right next door to it was
a slave-rental barracks.
At least, I reminded myself, it was free. I kicked at the door and shouted
for the butler.
It wasn’t the butler who opened it for me. It was Sam’s niece herself,
and she was a nice surprise. She was almost as tall as I was and just as
fair. Besides, she was young and very good-looking. "You must be Julius,”
she said. "I am Rachel, niece of Citizen Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus,
and I welcome you to my home.”
I kissed her hand. It’s a Kievan custom that I like, especially with
pretty girls I don’t yet know well, but hope to. "You don’t look Judaean,”
I told her.
"You don’t look like a sci-rom hack,” she replied. Her voice was less
chilling than her words, but not much. "Uncle Sam isn’t here, and I’m
afraid I’ve got work I must do. Basilius will show you to your rooms and
offer you some refreshment.”
I usually make a better first impression on young women. I usually
work at it more carefully, but she had taken me by surprise. I had more
or less expected that Sam’s niece would look more or less like Sam, except
probably for the baldness and the wrinkled face. I could not have been
more wrong.
I had been wrong about the house, too. It was a big one. There had to
be well over a dozen rooms, not counting servants’ quarters, and the
atrium was covered with one of those partly reflecting films that keep
the worst of the heat out.
The famous Egyptian sun was directly overhead when Basilius,
Rachel’s butler, showed me my rooms. They were pleasingly bright and
airy, but Basilius suggested I might enjoy being outside. He was right.
He brought wine and fruits to me in the atrium, a pleasant bench by a
fountain. Through the film the sun looked only pale and pleasant instead
of deadly hot. The fruit was fresh, too — ^pineapples from Lebanon, oranges
from Judaea, apples that must have come all the way from somewhere
in Gaul. The only thing wrong that I could see was that Rachel herself
stayed in her rooms, so I didn’t have a chance to try to put myself in a
better light with her.
She had left instructions for my comfort, though. Basilius clapped his
hands and another servant appeared, bearing stylus and tablets in case
I should decide to work. I was surprised to see that both Basilius and the
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163
other one were Africs; they don’t usually get into political trouble, or
trouble with the aediles of any kind, so not many of them are slaves.
The foiuitain was a Cupid statue. In some circumstances I would have
thought of that as a good sign, but here it didn’t seem to mean anything.
Cupid’s nose was chipped, and the fountain was obviously older than
Rachel was. I thought of just staying there until Rachel came out, but
when I asked Basilius when that would be he gave me a look of delicate
patronizing. "Citizeness Rachel works through the afternoon. Citizen
Julius,” he informed me.
"Oh? And what does she work at?”
"Citizeness Rachel is a famous historian,” he said. "She often works
straight through until bedtime. But for you and her uncle, of course,
dinner will be served at your convenience.”
He was quite an obliging fellow. "Thank you, Basilius,” I said. "I believe
I’ll go out for a few hours myself.” And then, curiously, as he turned
politely to go, I said, "You don’t look like a very dangerous criminal. If
you don’t mind my asking, what were you enslaved for?”
"Oh, not for anything violent. Citizen Julius,” he assured me. "Just
for debts.”
I found my way to the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior easily
enough. There was a lot of traffic going that way, because it is, after all,
one of the sights of Alexandria.
The Senate-Inferior wasn’t in session at the time. There was no reason
it should have been, of course, because what did the Egyptians need a
Senate of any kind for? The time when they’d made any significant
decisions for themselves was many centuries past.
They’d spread themselves for the conference, though. The Senate Tem-
ple had niches for at least half a hundred gods. There were the customary
figures of Amon-Ra and Jupiter and all the other main figures of the
pantheon, of course, but for the sake of the visitors they had installed
Ahura-Mazda, Yahweh, Freya, Quetzalcoatl and at least a dozen I didn’t
recognize at all. They were all decorated with fresh sacrifices of flowers
and fhiits, showing that the tourists, if not the astronomers — and prob-
ably the astronomers as well — ^were taking no chances in getting com-
munications with the Olympians restored. Scientists are an agnostic lot,
of course — well, most educated people are, aren’t they? But even an
agnostic will risk a piece of fruit to placate a god, just on the chance he’s
wrong.
Outside the hall hucksters were already putting up their stands, al-
though the first session wouldn’t begin for another day. I bought some
dates from one of them and wandered around, eating dates and studying
the marble frieze on the wall of the Senate. It showed the rippling fields
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FREDERIK POHL
of com, wheat, and potatoes that had made Egypt the breadbasket of the
Empire for two thousand years. It didn’t show anything about the Olym-
pians, of course. Space is not a subject that interests the Egyptians a lot.
They prefer to look back on their glorious (they say it’s glorious) past;
and there would have been no point in having the conference on the
Olympians there at all, except who wants to go to some northern city in
December?
Inside, the great hall was empty, except for slaves arranging seat
cushions and cuspidors for the participants. The exhibit halls were noisy
with workers setting up displays, but they didn’t want people dropping
in to bother them, and the participants’ lounges were dark.
I was lucky enough to find the media room open. It was always good
for a free glass of wine, and besides I wanted to know where everyone
was. The slave in charge couldn’t tell me. "There’s supposed to be a
private executive meeting somewhere, that’s all I know — and there’s all
these journalists looking for someone to interview.” And then, peering
over my shoulder as I signed in: "Oh, you’re the fellow that writes the
sci-roms, aren’t you? Well, maybe one of the journalists would settle for
you.”
It wasn’t the most flattering invitation I’d ever had. Still, I didn’t say
no. Marcus is always after me to do publicity gigs whenever I get the
chance, because he thinks it sells books, and it was worthwhile trying
to please Marcus just then.
The journalist wasn’t much pleased, though. They’d set up a couple of
studios in the basement of the Senate, and when I found the one I was
directed to the interviewer was fussing over his hairdo in front of a
mirror. A couple of technicians were lounging in front of the tube, watch-
ing a broadcast comedy series. When I introduced myself the interviewer
took his eyes off his own image long enough to cast a doubtful look in
my direction.
"You’re not a real astronomer,” he told me.
I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it.
"Still,” he grumbled, "Fd better get some kind of a spot for the late
news. All right. Sit over there, and try to sound as if you know what
you’re talking about.” Then he began telling the technical crew what to
do.
That was a strange thing. I’d already noticed that the technicians wore
citizens’ gold. The interviewer didn’t. But he was the one who was giving
them orders.
I didn’t approve of that at all. I don’t like big commercial outfits that
put slaves in positions of authority over free citizens. It’s a bad practice.
Jobs like tutors, college professors, doctors, and so on are fine; slaves can
do them as well as a citizen, and usually a lot cheaper. But there’s a
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moral issue involved here. A slave must have a master. Otherwise, how
can you call him a slave? And when you let the slave be the master, even
in something as trivial as a broadcasting studio, you strike at the foun-
dations of society.
The other thing is that it isn’t fair competition. There are free citizens
who need those jobs. We had some of that in my own line of work a few
years ago. There were two or three slave authors turning out adventure
novels, but the rest of us got together and put a stop to it — especially
after Marcus bought one of them to use as a sub-editor. Not one citizen
writer would work with her. Mark finally had to put her into the publicity
department, where she couldn’t do any harm.
So I started the interview with a chip on my shoulder, and his first
question made it worse. He plunged right in: "When you’re pounding out
those sci-roms of yours, do you make any effort to keep in touch with
scientific reality? Do you know, for instance, that the Olympians have
stopped transmitting?”
I scowled at him, regardless of the cameras. "Science-adventure rom-
ances are about scientific reality. And the Olympians haven’t 'stopped,’
as you put it. There’s just been a technical hitch of some kind, probably
caused by radio interference from our own Sun. As I said in my earlier
romance. The Radio Gods, electromagnetic impulses are susceptible to —
He cut me off. "It’s been — ” he glanced at his watch " — twenty-nine
hours since they stopped. That doesn’t sound like just a technical hitch.”
"Of course it is. There’s no reason for them to 'stop.’ We’ve already
demonstrated to them that we’re truly civilized, first because we’re tech-
nological, second because we don’t fight wars any more — that was cleared
up in the first year. As I said in my roman. The Radio Gods — ”
He gave me a pained look, then turned and winked into the camera.
"You can’t keep a hack from plugging his books, can you?” he remarked
humorously. "But it looks like he doesn’t want to use that wild imagi-
nation unless he gets paid for it. All I’m asking him for is a guess at why
the Olympians don’t want to talk to us any more, and all he gives me
is commercials.”
As though there were any other reason to do interviews! "Look here,”
I said sharply, "if you can’t be courteous when you speak to a citizen I’m
not prepared to go on with this conversation at all.”
be it, pal,” he said, icy cold. He turned to the technical crew. "Stop
the cameras,” he ordered. "We’re going back to the studio. This is a waste
of time.” And we parted on terms of mutual dislike, and once again I
had done something that my editor would have been glad to kill me for.
That night at dinner, Sam was no comfort. "He’s an unpleasant man,
sure,” he told me, "but the trouble is. I’m afraid he’s right.”
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"Thes^ve really stopped!'’
Sam shrugged. "We’re not in line with the Sun any more, so that’s
definitely not the reason. Damn. I was hoping it would be.”
"Fm sorry about that, Uncle Sam,” Rachel said gently. She was wearing
a simple white robe, Hannish silk by the look of it, with no decorations
at all. It really looked good on her. I didn’t think there was anything
under it except for some very well formed female flesh.
"Fm sorry, too,” he grumbled. His concerns didn’t affect his appetite,
though. He was ladling in the first course — a sort of chicken soup, with
bits of a kind of pastry floating in it — and, for that matter, so was I.
Whatever Rachel’s faults might be, she had a good cook. It was plain
home cooking, none of your partridge-in-a-rabbit-inside-a-boar kind of
thing, but well prepared and expertly served by her butler, Basilius.
"Anyway,” Sam said, mopping up the last of the broth, "I’ve figured it
out.”
"Why the Olympians stopped?” I asked, to encourage him to go on with
the revelation.
"No, no! I mean about your romance, Julie. My alternate world idea.
If you don’t want to write about a different future, how about a different
now!”
I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was talking about, because
Rachel beat me to it. "There’s only one 'now,’ Sam, dear,” she pointed
out. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Sam groaned. "Not you, too, honey,” he complained. "Fm talking about
a new kind of sci-rom.”
"I don’t read many sci-roms,” she apologized, in the tone that isn’t an
apology at all.
He ignored that. "You’re a historian, aren’t you?” She didn’t bother to
confirm it; obviously, it was the thing she was that shaped her life. "So
what if history had gone a different way?”
He beamed at us as happily as though he had said something that
made sense. Neither of us beamed back. Rachel pointed out the flaw in
his remark. "It didn’t, though,” she told him.
"I said supposel This isn’t the only possible 'now,’ it’s just the one that
happened to occur! There could have been a million different ones. Look
at all the events in the past that could have gone a different way. Suppose
Annius F*ublius hadn’t discovered the Western Continents in City Year
1820. Suppose Caesar Publius Terminus hadn’t decreed the development
of a space program in 2122. Don’t you see what Fm driving at? What
kind of a world would we be living in now if those things hadn’t hap-
pened?”
Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but she was saved by the butler.
He appeared in the doorway with a look of silent appeal. When she
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
167
excused herself to see what was needed in the kitchen, that left it up to
me. "I never wrote anything like that, Sam,” I told him. "I don’t know
anybody else who did, either.”
"That’s exactly what I’m driving at! It would he something completely
mw in sci-roms. Don’t you want to pioneer a whole new kind of story?”
Out of the wisdom of experience, I told him, "Pioneers don’t make any
money, Sam.” He scowled at me. "You could write it yourself,” I sug-
gested.
That just changed the annoyance to gloom. "I wish I could. But until
this business with the Olympians is cleared up I’m not going to have
much time for sci-roms. No, it’s up to you, Julie.”
Then Rachel came back in, looking pleased with herself, followed by
Basilius bearing a huge silver platter containing the main course.
Sam cheered up at once. So did I. The main dish was a whole roasted
baby kid, and I realized that the reason Rachel had been called into the
kitchen was so that she could weave a garland of flowers around its tiny
baby horn buds herself. 'The maidservant followed with a pitcher of wine,
replenishing all our goblets. All in all, we were busy enough eating to
stop any conversation but compliments on the food.
'Then Sam looked at his watch. "Great dinner, Rachel,” he told his
niece, "but I’ve got to get back. What about it?”
"What about what?” she asked.
"About helping poor Julie with some historical turning points he can
use in a story?”
He hadn’t listened to a word I’d said. I didn’t have to say so, because
Rachel was looking concerned. She said apologetically, "I don’t know
anything about those periods you were talking about — Publius Terminus
and so on. My specialty is the immediate post-Augustan period, when
the Senate came back to power.”
"Fine,” he said, pleased with himself and showing it. "That’s as good
a period as any. Think how different things might be now if some little
event then had gone in a different way. Say, if Augustus hadn’t married
the Lady Livia and adopted her son Drusus to succeed him.” He turned
to me, encouraging me to take fire from his spark of inspiration. "I’m
sure you see the possibilities, Julie! Tell you what you should do. The
night’s young yet; take Rachel out dancing or something; have a few
drinks; listen to her talk. What’s wrong with that? You two young people
ought to be having fun, anyway!”
'That was definitely the most intelligent thing intelligent Sam had said
in days.
So I thought, anyway, and Rachel was a good enough niece to heed
her uncle’s advice. Because I was a stranger in town, I had to let her
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FREDERIK POHL
pick the place. After the first couple she mentioned I realized that she
was tactfully trying to spare my pocketbook. I couldn’t allow that. After
all, a night on the town with Rachel was probably cheaper, and anyway
a whole lot more interesting, than the cost of an inn and meals.
We settled on a place right on the harborside, out toward the break-
water. It was a revolving night club on top of an inn built along the style
of one of the old Pyramids. As the room slowly turned we saw the lights
of the city of Alexandria, the shipping in the harbor, then the wide sea
itself, its gentle waves reflecting starlight.
I was prepared to forget the whole idea of "alternate worlds,” but
Rachel was more dutiful than that. After the first dance, she said, "I
think I can help you. There was something that happened in Drusus’s
reign — ”
"Do we have to talk about that?” I asked, refilling her glass.
"But Uncle Sam said we should. I thought you wanted to try a new
kind of sci-rom.”
"No, that’s your \mcle that wants that. See, there’s a bit of a problem
here. It’s true that editors are always begging for something new and
different, but if you’re dumb enough to try to give it to them they don’t
recognize it. When they ask for 'different,’ what they mean is something
right down the good old 'different’ groove.”
"I think,” she informed me, with the certainty of an oracle and a lot
less confusion of style, "that when my uncle has an idea, it’s usually a
good one.” I didn’t want to argue with her; I didn’t even disagree, at least
usually. I let her talk. "You see,” she said, "my specialty is the transfer
of power throughout early Roman history. What I’m studying right now
is the Judaean Diaspora, after Drusus’s reign. You know what happened
then, I suppose?”
Actually, I did — hazily. "That was the year of the Judaean rebellion,
wasn’t it?”
She nodded. She looked very pretty when she nodded, her fair hair
moving gracefully and her eyes sparkling. "You see, that was a great
tragedy for the Judaeans, and, just as my uncle said, it needn’t have
happened. If Procurator Tiberius had lived, it wouldn’t.”
I coughed. "I’m not sure I know who Tiberius was,” I said apologetically.
"He was the Procurator of Judaea, and a very good one. He was just
and fair. He was the brother of the Emperor Drusus — the one my uncle
was talking about, Livia’s son, the adopted heir of Caesar Augustus. The
one who restored the power of the Senate after Augustus had appropri-
ated most of it for himself. Anyway, Tiberius was the best governor the
Judaeans ever had, just as Drusus was the best emperor. Tiberius died
just a year before the rebellion — ate some spoiled figs, they say, although
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
169
it might have been his wife that did it — she was Julia, the daughter of
Augustus by his first wife — ”
I signaled distress. "I’m getting a little confused by all these names,”
I admitted.
"Well, the important one to remember is Tiberius, and you know who
he was. If he had lived the rebellion probably wouldn’t have happened.
Then there wouldn’t have been a Diaspora.”
"I see,” I said. "Would you like another dance?”
She frowned at me, then smiled. "Maybe that’s not such an interesting
subject — unless you’re a Judaean, anyway,” she said. "All right, let’s
dance.”
That was the best idea yet. It gave me a chance to confirm with my
fingers what my eyes, ears, and nose had already told me; this was a
very attractive young woman. She had insisted on changing, but fortu-
nately the new gown was as soft and clinging as the old, and the palms
of my hands rejoiced in the tactile pleasures of her back and arm. I
whispered, "I’m sorry if I sound stupid. I really don’t know a whole lot
about early history — ^you know, the first thousand years or so after the
Founding of the City.”
She didn’t bother to point out that she did. She moved with me to the
music, very enjoyably, then she straightened up. "I’ve got a different
idea,” she announced. "Let’s go back to the booth.” And she was already
telling it to me as we left the dance floor: "Let’s talk about your own
ancestor, Julius Caesar. He conquered Egypt, right here in Alexandria.
But suppose the Egyptians had defeated him instead, as they very nearly
did?”
I was paying close attention now — obviously she had been interested
enough in me to ask Sam some questions! "They couldn’t have,” I told
her. "Julius never lost a war. An5rway — ” I discovered to my surprise
that I was beginning to take Sam’s nutty idea seriously " — that would
be a really hard one to write, wouldn’t it? If the Legions had been de-
feated, it would have changed the whole world. Can you imagine a world
that isn’t Roman?”
She said sweetly, "No, but that’s more your job than mine, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. "It’s too bizarre,” I complained. "I couldn’t make the
readers believe it.”
"You could try, Julius,” she told me. "You see, there’s an interesting
possibility there. Drusus almost didn’t live to become Emperor. He was
severely wounded in a war in Gaul, while Augustus was still alive.
Tiberius— you remember Tiberius — ”
"Yes, yes, his brother. The one you like. The one he made Procimator
of Judaea.”
"That’s the one. Well, Tiberius rode day and night to bring Drusus the
170 FREDERIK POHL
best doctors in Rome. He almost didn’t make it. They barely pulled
Drusus through.”
"Yes?” I said encouragingly. "And what then?”
She looked uncertain. "Well, I don’t know what then.”
I poured some more wine. "I guess I could figure out some kind of
speculative idea,” I said, ruminating. "Especially if you would help me
with some of the details. I suppose Tiberius would have become Emperor
instead of Drusus. You say he was a good man; so probably he would
have done more or less what Drusus did — ^restore the power of the Senate,
after Augustus and my revered great-great Julius between them had
pretty nearly put it out of business — ”
I stopped there, startled at my own words. It almost seemed that I was
beginning to take Sam’s crazy idea seriously!
On the other hand, that wasn’t all bad. It also seemed that Rachel was
beginning to take me seriously.
'That was a good thought. It kept me cheerful through half a dozen
more dances and at least another hour’s of history lessons from her pretty
lips . . . right up until the time when, after we had gone back to her
house, I tiptoed out of my room toward hers, and found her butler, Bas-
ilius, asleep on a rug across her doorway, with a great, thick club by his
side.
I didn’t sleep well that night.
Partly it was glandular. My head knew that Rachel didn’t want me
creeping into her bedroom, or else she wouldn’t have put the butler there
in the way. But my glands weren’t happy with that news. They had
soaked up the smell and sight and feel of her, and they were complaining
about being thwarted.
'The worst part was waking up every hour or so to contemplate financial
ruin.
Being poor wasn’t so bad. Every writer has to learn how to be poor
from time to time, between checks. It’s an annoyance, but not a catas-
trophe. You don’t get enslaved just for poverty.
But I had been running up some pretty big bills. And you do get
enslaved for debt.
Chapter 4
The End of the Dream
The next morning I woke up late and grouchy and had to take a three-
wheeler to the Hall of the Senate-Inferior.
It was slow going. As we approached, the traffic thickened even more.
I could see the Legion forming for the ceremonial guard as the Pharaoh’s
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
171
procession approached to open the ceremonies. The driver wouldn’t take
me any closer than the outer square, and I had to wait there with all the
tourists, while the Pharaoh dismounted from her royal litter.
There was a soft, pleasured noise from the crowd, halfway between a
giggle and a sigh. That was the spectacle the tourists had come to see.
They pressed against the sheathed swords of the Legionaries while the
Pharaoh, head bare, robe trailing on the ground, advanced on the shrines
outside the Senate building. She sacrificed reverently and unhurriedly
to them, while the tourists flashed their cameras at her, and I began to
worry about the time. What if she ecumenically decided to visit all fifty
shrines? But after doing Isis, Amon-Ra, and Mother Nile, she went inside
to declare the Congress open. The Legionaries relaxed. The tourists began
to flow back to their buses, snapping pictures of themselves now, and I
followed the Pharaoh inside.
She made a good, by which I mean short, opening address. The only
thing wrong with it was that she was talking to mostly empty seats.
The Hall of the Alexandrian Senate-Inferior holds two thousand people.
There weren’t more than a hundred and fifty in it. Most of those were
huddled in small groups in the aisles and at the back of the hall, and
they were paying no attention at all to the Pharaoh. I think she saw that
and shortened her speech. At one moment she was telling us how the
scientific investigation of the outside universe was completely in accord
with the ancient traditions of Egypt — with hardly anyone listening — and
at the next her voice had stopped without warning and she was handing
her orb and scepter to her attendants. She proceeded regally across the
stage and out the wings.
The buzz of conversation hardly slackened. What they were talking
about, of course, was the Olympians. Even when the Collegium-Presidor
stepped forward and called for the first session to begin the hall didn’t
fill. At least most of the scattered groups of people in the room sat
down — though still in clumps, and still doing a lot of whispering to each
other.
Even the speakers didn’t seem very interested in what they were say-
ing. The first one was an honorary Presidor-Emeritus from the southern
highlands of Egypt, and he gave us a review of everything we knew
about the Olympians.
He read it as hurriedly as though he were dictating it to a scribe. It
wasn’t very interesting. The trouble, of course, was that his paper had
been prepared days earlier, while the Olympian transmissions were still
flooding in and no one had any thought they might be interrupted. It
just didn’t seem relevant any more.
What I like about going to science congresses isn’t so much the actual
papers the speakers deliver — I can get that sort of information better
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FREDERIK POHL
from the journals in the library. It isn’t even the back-and-forth discus-
sion that follows each paper, although that sometimes produces useful
background bits. What I get the most out of is what I call "the sound of
science” — the kind of shorthand language scientists use when they’re
talking to each other about their own specialties. So I usually sit some-
where at the back of the hall, with as much space around me as I can
manage, my tablet in my lap and my stylus in my hand, writing down
bits of dialogue and figuring how to put them into my next sci-rom.
There wasn’t much of that today. There wasn’t much discussion at all.
One by one the speakers got up and read their papers, answered a couple
of cursory questions with cursory replies and hurried off; and when each
one finished he left and the audience got smaller, because, as I finally
figured out, no one was there who wasn’t obligated to be.
When boredom made me decide that I needed a glass of wine and a
quick snack more than I needed to sit there with my still blank tablet
I found out there was hardly anyone even in the lounges. There was no
familiar face. No one seemed to know where Sam was. And in the after-
noon, the Presidor, bowing to the inevitable, announced that the re-
maining sessions would be postponed indefinitely.
The day was a total waste.
I had a lot more hopes for the night.
Rachel greeted me with the news that Sam had sent a message to say
that he was detained and wouldn’t make dinner.
"Did he say where he was?” She shook her head. "He’s off with some
of the other top people,” I guessed. I told her about the collapse of the
convention. Then I brightened. "At least let’s go out for dinner, then,”
I offered.
Rachel firmly vetoed the idea. She was tactful enough not to mention
money, although I was sure Sam had filled her in on my precarious
financial state. "I like my own cook’s food better than any restaurant,”
she told me. "We’ll eat here. There won’t be anything fancy tonight — just
a simple meal for the two of us.”
The best part of that was "the two of us.” Basilius had arranged the
couches in a sort of Vee, so that our heads were quite close together, with
the low serving tables in easy reach between us. As soon as she lay down
Rachel confessed, "I didn’t get a lot of work done today. I couldn’t get
that idea of yours out of my head.”
The idea was Sam’s, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to correct
her. "I’m flattered,” I told her. "I’m sorry I spoiled your work.”
She shrugged and went on, "I did a little reading on the period, es-
pecially about an interesting minor figure who lived around then, a
Judaean preacher named Jeshua of Nazareth. Did you ever hear of him?
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
173
Well, most people haven’t, but he had a lot of followers at one time. They
called themselves Chrestians, and they were a very unruly bunch.”
"I’m afraid I don’t know much about Judaean history,” I said. Which
was true; but then I added, "But I’d really like to learn more.” Which
wasn’t; or at least hadn’t been until just then.
"Of course,” Rachel said. No doubt to her it seemed quite natural that
everyone in the world would wish to know more about the post- Augustan
period. "Anyway, this Jeshua was on trial for sedition. He was condemned
to death.”
I blinked at her. "Not just to slavery?”
She shook her head. "They didn’t just enslave criminals back then,
they did physical things to them. Even executed them, sometimes in very
barbarous ways. But Tiberius, as Proconsul, decided that the penalty
was too extreme. So he commuted Jeshua’s death sentence. He just had
him whipped and let him go. A very good decision, I think. Otherwise
he would have made him a martyr, and gods know what would have
happened after that. As it was, the Chrestians just gradually waned
away. . . . Basilius? You can bring the next course in now.”
I watched with interest as Basilius complied. It turned out to be larks
and olives! I approved, not simply for the fact that I liked the dish. The
"simple meal” was actually a lot more elaborate than she had provided
for the three of us the night before.
Things were looking up. I said, "Can you tell me something, Rachel?
I think you’re Judaean yourself, aren’t you?”
"Of course.”
"Well, I’m a little confused,” I said. "I thought the Judaeans believed
in the god Yahveh.”
"Of course, Julie. We do.”
"Yes, but — ” I hesitated. I didn’t want to mess up the way things were
going, but I was curious. "But you say 'gods.’ Isn’t that, well, a contra-
diction?”
"Not at all,” she told me, civilly enough. "Yahveh’s commandments
were brought down from a mountaintop by our great prophet, Moses,
and they are very clear on the subject. One of them says, 'Thou shalt
have no other gods before me.’ Well, we don’t, you see? Yahveh is our
first god. There aren’t any before him. It’s all explained in the rabbinical
writings.”
"And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”
She looked thoughtful. "In a way. We’re a very traditional people,
Julie. 'Tradition is what we follow; the rabbinical writings simply explain
the traditions.”
She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress
her cheek.
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FREDERIK POHL
She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she
said, not looking at me, "For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that
a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”
My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious
command from me. "Oh?”
"And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see.
They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried
daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male
head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”
"I see,” I said. "You’ve never been married, have you?”
"Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.
I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly
a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that
the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially
stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I
wanted to spend my life with ... or, to quote Rachel, "not yet.”
I tried to keep my mind off that subject. It was sure that if my finances
had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.
The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel
settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. "Sit down with
me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside her. "I was up late,
thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua
had been executed after all.”
It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it some-
thing I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough
to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early
sim shining down on us through the translucent shades. "Yes?” I said
noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.
She took a moment before she took her hand back. "That idea opened
some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr,
you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chres-
tian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might
even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind
of turmoil or another around that time, an5rway — there were all sorts of
prophecies and rumors about messiahs and changes in society. The Chres-
tians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”
I tried to be tactful. "There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your
ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?”
I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me
with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried
to cover myself: "On the other hand,” I went on quickly, "suppose you
expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
175
It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. "What do
you mean, beyond Judaea?”
"Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian Judaean kind of — what would you
call it? Philosophy? Religion?”
"A little of both. I’d say.”
"Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world,
not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”
"But, really, no such thing hap — ”
"Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affec-
tionately, "we’re saying what if, remember? Every sci-rom writer is en-
titled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that Chrestian-
Judaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe
the City becomes the, what do you call it, the place for the Sanhedrin
of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”
"You tell me,” she said, half amused, half suspicious.
"Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom
writer, "it might develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking
about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splin-
tering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”
"Fight wars?” she asked incredulously.
"Fight big wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then
they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times.
After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two
thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that — Why, without
that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as
I went along, "let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into inde-
pendent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful.
And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae
against the Kelts.”
She was shaking her head. "People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she
complained.
"How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t
pause to see if she reacted to the "dear.” I went right on, but not failing
to notice that she hadn’t objected: "The people will be as silly as I want
them to be — as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But
you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian Judaeans
take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the
will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you
follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery,
for instance.”
"No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. "Are you
trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m
not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”
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FREDERIK POHL
"But you’re not Chrestian Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference.
Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story.
So, let’s see — ’’ I paused for thought " — all right, let’s say the Chrestians
go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then — ’’ I paused,
not because I didn’t know what was coming next, but to build the effect.
"And then along come the Olympians!”
She gazed at me blankly. "Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.
"Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing
along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age, no aircraft, no electronic
broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine — and it’s sud-
denly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from
outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, forgetting to eat,
trying to understand what I was driving at. "It’s terrible culture shock,”
I explained. "And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians
come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward
and divided into warring nations and all that . . . and what do they do?
Why, they turn right around and leave us! and . . . and that’s the end
of the book!”
She pursed her lips. "But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she
said cautiously.
"But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t our world I’m talking
about. It’s a what j/" world.”
"It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.
I said happily, "That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand
sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far
as it will go — to the absolute limit of credibility — to the point where if
he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity.
'Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”
She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her
to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned toward
her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time.
Then I said, "I’ve got to get to a scribe, I want to get all this down before
I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and — And until then — well, here.”
And I kissed her again, gently, firmly, and long; and it was quite clear
early in the process that she was kissing me back.
Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe
to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me horrow one
of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had the
first two chapters and an outline of Sidewise to a Chrestian World down.
Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea
is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter
of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and
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177
then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural,
because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ
a second, and then a third.
I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two
straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it
was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it
down to the shipping offices by the harbor and dispatch it by fast air to
Marcus in London.
Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised
to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.
Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and
unshaved face. "Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a
journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down,
turned over once, and was gone.
When I woke up at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring
me something to eat, and shave me, and when I finally got out to the
atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her
what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olym-
pians. "Last?” I objected. "How can you be sure it’s the last?”
"Because they said so,” she told me sadly. "They said they were break-
ing off communications.”
"Oh,” I said, thinking about that. "Poor Sam,” I said, thinking about
Flavius Samuelus. And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself,
I took her in my arms.
Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of
that she leaned back, smiling at me.
I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words
come out of my mouth as I said, "Rachel, I wish we could get married.”
She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised
amusement. "Are you proposing to me?”
I was careful of my grammar. "That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said
I wished we could get married.”
"I imderstood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me
to grant your wish.”
"No — well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to
ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation,
you know. The way you live here — ”
"The way I live here,” she said, "is paid for by the estate I inherited
from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”
"But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been
a parasite.”
"You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was
being careful about her grammar, too.
178
FREDERIK POHL
Which took a lot of will-power on my part. "Rachel,” I said, "I should
be hearing from my editor any time now. If this new kind of sci-rom
catches on — If it’s as popular as it might be — ”
"Yes?” she prompted.
"Why,” I said, "then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know
that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And
then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all
the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks — ”
"Julie,” she said, putting her finger over my lips, "call him up.”
The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through — and, because it
was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was
quite sober. "Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really fiirious,
"where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”
But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. "Did
you have a chance to read Sidewise to a Chrestian Worlds” I asked.
"The what? Oh, that thing. Nah. I haven’t even looked at it. I’ll buy
it, naturally,” he said, "but what I’m talking about is An Ass’s Olympiad.
The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do
now is make the Olympian a little dumber, a little nastier — ^you’ve got
a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So
when can you get back here to fix it up?”
"Why — Well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover
timetable — ”
"Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane — ^we’ll pick up the tab.
And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be
in your account this afternoon.”
And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel,
she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to
London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.
Chapter 5
'The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made
To be a freelance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very
easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to
go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your
very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To
be a potentially bestselling writer is a whole order of magnitude different.
Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s
offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian
into the most doltish, feckless, unlikeable being the universe had ever
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
179
seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Mar-
cus loved'it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in
Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around
the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my
book simultaneously in all of them. "We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,”
he exulted. "It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have
more money — ^you’re in the big time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios
were interested — interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d
finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who CEune for interviews
every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs
and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and,
all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the high-
speed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.
Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad.
He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s
house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I
tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it.
So I offered, "At least, now you can get back to your real work.”
He looked at me strangely. "Writing sci-roms?” he asked.
"No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your
extra-solar probe to keep you busy.”
"Julie,” he said sadly, "where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the
last Ol5Tnpian message?”
"Well, sure,” I said, offended. "Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then
I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told
me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. "I guess
I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.
He looked sadder than ever. "Then maybe you don’t know that they
said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us,
they were terminating even our own probes.”
"Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if they’d stopped transmitting!”
He said patiently, "No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were send-
ing is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in. But
that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”
He broke off, peering out the window. "And that’s the way it is,” he
said. "We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to
be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”
The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like
traveling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for
the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing.
Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broad-
180
FREDERIK POHL
casts, publishers’ meetings, receptions — we were kept busy for a solid
month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.
Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel
was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not
have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother
with Polaris Australis — nobody there but penguins.) And we took time
for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of
Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of
the Western Continents — we did it all.
When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the
remodeling of Rachel’s villa — which, we had decided, would now be our
winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place
where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had
moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the
door.
"I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and
Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.
"Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said.
"The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”
I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for
us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the
vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier
I would have been delighted at anything so costly. "But we know what
went wrong,” I told him reasonably. "They decided against us.”
"Of course they did,” he said, "but why? I’ve been trying to work out
just what messages were being received when they broke off communi-
cations.”
"Do you think we said something to offend them?”
He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me, then he
sighed. "What would you think, Julius?”
"Well, maybe so,” I admitted. "What messages were they?”
"I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know,
acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and
forty groups — ”
"I didn’t know.”
"Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of
Rome. Unfortunately, it was six hundred and fifty thousand words long.”
"So you have to read the whole history?”
"Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have
been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three
hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing
that was new was some of the social data. We were transmitting census
figures — so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freed-
WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
181
men, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, "Paulus
Magnus — I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan — pointed out
that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”
I waited for him to go on. "Yes?” I said encouragingly.
He shrugged. "Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got
it on his mind a lot.”
"I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. "Isn’t
there anything else?”
"Oh,” he said, "there are a thousand theories. There was some health
data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly
got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we
weren’t polite enough. Or maybe, who knows, there was some sort of
power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t
want any more new races in their community.”
"And we don’t know yet which it was?”
"It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me somberly. "I don’t think we
ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want
to have anything to do with us;” and in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben
Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have. #
182
FREDERIK POHL
BEYOND
PROCREATION
Sophisticated and illiterate,
these children who call themselves
“the last generation”
have borrowed the surgeon’s scalpel
and the tattoo artist’s ink
to artificially transform
their bodies beyond any semblance
to the species known as human;
in a fierce finale of revenge
against the weight of their
inheritance and those who have
delivered it upon them,
against the sexual plagues
and the phallic stockpiles,
against the torn stratosphere
and the torpid yellow seas,
they now come of age telling
age they know the game already,
rough young beasts slouching
the streets with their scarred
and brightly sloganed flesh
bared to the poisonous
ultraviolet of the day,
not towards any Bethlehem
but aimlessly back and forth,
anticipating the ultimate flash
dance of some genocidal pulse
to fulfill the prophecy
and justify the mean extent
of their own deformation.
— Bruce Boston
m BOCKS
b/ Baird Seaiies
Misguided Light
An Allen Light
By Nancy Kress
Arbor House, $18.95
How you feel about Nancy Kress’s
An Alien Light will very much de-
pend on how you feel about mis-
understanding as a literary device.
"Aargh,” growls the reader. "Tell
us not of literary devices. Just tell
us what it’s about, pliz.”
Well, that’s the problem. The
novel’s all about misunderstand-
ing — or misconceptions — or (to get
really fancy) the limitations placed
on comprehension by cultural or
racial orientations.
"So that tells me a whole lot.
What’s it about?”
Okay. Okay. I’ll make the point
later. The Ged are your perfectly
ordinary, three-eyed aliens at war
with humanity. They are also baf-
fled by humanity, because their
vast experience with alien races
does not include one that both prac-
tices intraspecies violence and
makes it past discovering atomic
energy without blowing itself up.
By the Ged’s standards, humanity
should not exist.
By luck, the Ged discover a cast-
away culture of humans, which
does not remember its origins (from
a wrecked interstelleu" ship still
spewing radiation after many gen-
erations). Two cultures, to be ex-
act: the city-states of Jela and
Delysia. Jela is a communal cul-
ture geared to the values of war
(read Sparta). Delysia has a lais-
sez-faire culture and economy,
highly competitive and individual-
istic, where an)d;hing can be bought
and sold (read Athens); it has de-
veloped some arts and crafts.
The Ged build on this world a
huge structure as a sort of lab; into
it they lure representatives of both
Delysia and Jela with promises of
jewels and weaponry. Those that
pass a test in logic and curiosity
are kept, nurtured, and taught el-
ementary physics, biology, and
medicine. The point for the Ged is
to figure out how humans work,
since they are winning the war
against the Ged with their un-
known psychology.
The story is devoted to the con-
flicts and misxmderstandings among
Ged, Delysians, and Jelites, all of
whom consider their own manners,
mores, beliefs, and customs the
only right way of doing things; any
other is insane or immoral or both.
The humans are murderously in-
tolerant; the aliens intellectually
superior.
Despite the fact that Kress has
184
put much thought into this con-
cept, it just doesn’t come off. Mis-
understanding as a plot device
(sorry, just had to get back to that
point) has been with us from Greek
legends to TV sitcoms, and how
often have you become impatient
with a plot which would have been
utterly destroyed if two of the char-
acters had just had a sensible, one-
minute conversation?
In SF, this extends itself to the
misunderstandings between whole
cultures and races, and what’s hard
to believe is that supposedly so-
phisticated beings, well beyond a
certain intellectual level, will still
be baffled by the existence of alien
differences (not by the differences,
mind, but by their existence). Even
primitive old twentieth-century
humanity has developed the con-
cept of objective anthropology. Kress
tries hard to justify the Ged’s ob-
tuseness (and admittedly they are
bringing their intellectual powers
to the problem), but considering
that they’ve been around for lit-
erally ages, they come across as
singularly limited in scope. (They
also have a habit of breaking into
little chants of "Harmony sings
with us” "May it always sing.” "It
will always sing.” in what seems
like every other sentence, irresist-
ibly reminiscent of a barber-shop
quartet.)
As for the human characters, for
the most part they’re about as in-
teresting as any inhabitant of Iran
or California who is convinced that
his/her way is the way. And while
it’s edifying to see a couple of them
(one Jelite warrior-healer and one
Delysian glass blower in particu-
lar) becoming aware of the wonders
of science and learning, it’s not
enough to carry the novel.
Instant
Willow
By Wayland Drew
Del Rey, $3.95 (paper)
Can we please have a morato-
rium on fantasies featuring half-
sized people who live in idyllic rus-
ticism in quaint little villages, who
are menaced by magically malign
forces from outside, and one of
whom must go on a fearsome jour-
ney set by an amusing but powerful
wizard to save everybody in the
world from the dark sorcery ema-
nating from the evil power who
lives on or near a volcano? Those
are the basics for Wayland Drew’s
Willow, and if it sounds familiar,
it is . . . oh, it is.
And to boot, it’s crammed into a
very short novel indeed. Maybe it’s
the new instant fantasy mix. All
the familiar basics are there — just
add water and eggs (or something),
and it will turn into an epic before
your very eyes.
(Willow is soon to be a motion
picture; this could be the excuse,
if not the justification, for its short
coming. But, sold as a novel, re-
viewed as a novel . . . )
Alien Nations
Becoming Allen
By Rebecca Ore
Tor, $3.50 (paper)
Rebecca Ore’s Becoming Alien
185
ON BOOKS
starts off with just the hint of fa-
miliarity. Where have we heard of
an average American family who
takes in a stranded alien life form
who likes cats, and whom they call
Alph?
But no, it’s not a novelization of
a TV series. (Notice that’s not ALF,
but Alph — for Alpha).
But . . . due to the care given
Alph by the teen-aged boy in the
family, said boy is given what
amounts to a scholarship in the
space cadet academy of the Fed-
eration of Sapient Planets, and
goes on to become the first Terran
enrollee in said academy.
But no, it’s not a juvenile in the
best RAH-RAH-RAH (as in Robert
A. Heinlein — joke . . .) tradition,
where the first Terran space cadet
wins his fins by pluck, luck, and
unwillingly following the dictates
of his old, wise ex-Army teacher
(saving the Federation on the way
by sheer chance and following the
dictates . . . etc.).
No, despite superficial resem-
blances, Becoming Alien is neither
of those things, but an intelligent
(as opposed to TV fare), realistic,
gritty, adult novel. The average
American family in this case con-
sists of two orphaned brothers who
live in the Southern redneck boon-
ies, the older of whom runs a high-
powered drug manufacturing op-
eration in the (well-fortified) base-
ment. (Not TV average, I admit,
but maybe more so than those
weird families we do see on 'TV.)
Tom, the younger brother, res-
cues an alien from a burning ship
and dubs him Alph. Eventually,
the older brother, who harbors Alph
because he doesn’t want the Feds
poking around, kills him (not to-
tally with malice aforethought).
Members of Alph’s race finally lo-
cate Tom and find Alph’s final mes-
sage, which wills his place in the
Academy to Tom.
Tom’s trials and tribulations as
a cadet are not the usual pattern.
The main thrust of Ore’s novel is
the utter alienness of even com-
prehensible races (the many who
make up the Federation are either
mammalian or birdlike), and while
Tom has an adventure or two, the
emphasis is on the mix of aliens,
observed with enormous detail and
what can only be called realism.
There’s much emphasis on breed-
ing habits, sexual imperatives, ag-
gressive body language, elimination
(a description of a multi-racial pub-
lic lavatory is something of a tour
de force of extrapolation) and other
natural/inherited racial character-
istics. Xenophobia is a big factor
with all concerned; here again in
another mode is raised the ques-
tion of intuitive racial hostility and
misunderstanding (see above — An
Alien Light) versus acquired cul-
tural knowledge and sophistica-
tion. And again, perhaps, the scales
are tipped too far against cultural
objectivity for my taste, but it’s an
interestingly arguable point.
One problem with the book is
that Ore, with all the details that
are tossed at the reader, goes al-
most too fast. Key elements in the
story are sometimes nearly thrown
186
BAIRD SEARLES
away, and you find it hard to sort
out races and characters as they
accumulate. But the ability to take
a cliche situation and bring to it
this kind of originality certainly
indicates a talent to be reckoned
with.
SFTY
The Best of Science Fiction TV
By John Javna
Harmony Books, $8.95 (paper)
Any book with the title The Best
of Science Fiction TV could be one
of those well-known shortest books
ever published, but John Javna has
been able to get 144 pages out of
the subject somehow. This was ac-
complished in a complicated way
by polling TV critics, SF writers,
fans, and various other arcane
types, and from this culling a "Top
15” shows for a first chapter, a
"Worst 10” for a second chapter,
and filling in the rest of the book
with the in-betweens. So belying
the title, the book is really a survey
of SF TV, with a page or more on
each show with photos, plot, and
background info, and critics’ com-
ments.
The result is a rather messily
organized look at the history of TV
science fiction, with some usable
info and a lot of opinionated com-
mentary from various sources
which, as with all such, may in-
furiate the reader or satisfyingly
support his/her own opinions.
Among the top lot are (of course)
Star Trek (#1), The Twilight Zone
(1959-65 series). Amazing Stories,
and, surprisingly but satisfyingly.
Quark, a series I spent a lot of time
defending as actually having some
authentic sophisticated humor (rare
enough on TV, even rarer in SF).
Leading the "worst” list is Space
1999 (speaking of humor, in this
case unintentional), followed by
things such as The Starlost, Bat-
tlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers.
Artful Deco
Eddy Deco’s Last Caper
By Gahan Wilson
Times Books, $14.95
Gahan Wilson. He’s the chap, as
you know, who’s taken over the
mantel of the top cartoonist of the
macabre, and done so with contin-
uing taste and humor, no small
achievement in this tasteless, hu-
morless decade. He amused us for
years in The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction and then moved
on to lesser known journals such
as Playboy and The New Yorker.
Now he’s written us a pastiche de-
tective story that takes Sam Spade
against the aliens, and illustrated
it in spades (as it were).
While the opening is straight
from The Big Sleep, with the veiled
daughter of the colonel engaging
Eddy Deco, private eye, you al-
ready know there’s something pe-
culiar since also waiting for an
appointment is a thing. Deco, with
the usual private eye cool, doesn’t
make a big thing out of this (as it
were), and leaves it cooling its
heels (if any) in the waiting room.
However, the colonel’s daughter’s
problem (the severed finger of her
gangster husband) leads Deco into
ON BOOKS
187
a nest of things (tentacles, claws,
and what have you). Gee whilli-
kers! Rival gangs of aliens are
fighting it out undercover in thir-
ties NYC! Things build to a roaring
climax with what seems like every
inanimate object in the city (start-
ing with the art deco lamps in a
night club) coming alive and at-
tacking our hero. (An ambulatory
elevator is particularly nasty, and
some lethal heaps of garbage have
the Wilson touch.)
The grand finale has every sec-
ond skyscraper in New York taking
off. Seems that they were really
space ships in disguise.
Wilson’s illustrations for this epic
silliness are, of course, perfect, and
it’s a sly touch to have them all
(and there are a lot) portray the
action through Deco’s eyes — he is
never pictured. This is a subtle
hommage to the 1946 filming of
Chandler’s Lady In the Lake in
which the camera saw the story
through the eyes of Philip Mar-
lowe.
E. T. Portraits
Barlowe’s Guide to
Extraterrestrials
By Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Ian
Summers & Beth Meacham
Workman, $10.95 (paper)
Have you ever had the experi-
ence of being let down by a book-
cover illustration which either
didn’t show the characters from the
book that you wanted to see (par-
ticularly a wonderfully-conceived
alien that you couldn’t quite pic-
ture from the words alone) or even
worse, those characters shown
completely at odds with how they’re
described inside?
Here’s another art book from a
well-known cover artist in the field,
but this one is not just a collection
of covers. Wayne Barlowe is one of
the rare painters whose work often
manages to transcend the publish-
ing-house formula; his is a partic-
ularly intelligent talent which is
notably good at catching the es-
sence of the story. In other words,
unlike many cover artists, he often
seems to have actually read the
book.
And with Barlowe’s Guide to Ex-
traterrestrials (first published nine
years ago and long unavailable), it
became obvious that he had also
read other books. What it consists
of is full-color portraits of fifty of
the major aliens from (mostly) not-
able works of science fiction, me-
ticulously rendered and very well
researched indeed. It takes talent
enough to draw known, terrestrial
animals for which the artist has
models and photographs; did you
ever really stop and think how dif-
ficult it is to portray a totally un-
known creature and make it look
like it might exist?
Each portrait is accompanied by
a description of physical character-
istics, habitat, culture and/or re-
production (if any), and subsidiary
detail drawings. There’s a pull-out
chart to give scale for each portrait
(reproduced) with the human rep-
resented by Barlowe himself.
Not only is the book great fun to
look at, but unlike many art books.
188
BAIRD SEARLES
there is just the chance that it
might lead the viewer on to ac-
tually read some of the novels fea-
turing these fabulous beings. How
could you resist wanting to know
more about the demonic, barb-tailed
Overlords from Clarke’s Child-
hood’s End, or the fragile, many-
legged, moth-winged Cinruss of
White’s Hospital Station? Here is
an admirable way for those many
SF readers who have depended
simply on the new releases section
for their books to gain an intro-
duction to much of the good stuff
from the past.
Classic Sword
The Broken Sword
By Poul Anderson
Baen, $2.95 (paper)
It’s hard to believe that up until
barely ten years ago, contemporary
fantasies were almost nonexistent.
There were children’s fantasies,
there was Tolkien (which most peo-
ple considered children’s fantasy),
and there were a bare handful of
other works. After an auspicious
start in the magazine Unknown
(edited by the prodigious John W.
Campbell, who also more or less
shaped modem SF in his other
magazine. Astounding [now Ana-
log]), modern American fantasy
limped along confined to a few
none-too-classy magazines (Un-
known had been a victim of the
WWII paper shortage). The genre
for adults was confined to the cute,
the quaint, and the whimsical.
(Tolkien would reach best-selling
cult status in the sixties — much to
the horror of those of us who had
discovered him earlier — and true
fantasy would not be regarded as
a viable "market” by publishers
until ten years later.)
Into this wasteland in the mid-
1950s came a novel by the young
science fiction writer, Poul Ander-
son, called The Broken Sword. It
was tme high fantasy, but very
unlike Tolkien (The Lord of the
Rings was just being published
— each volume six months apart — at
the time). The prose style was
American and direct, and the re-
ferential fantasy base was not An-
glo/Celtic but high Scandinavian.
It is set in the tenth century, and
realistically tells the story of a
changeling, a human child cap-
tured by elves and raised in the elf
mounds. Anderson’s elves are not
beneficent; they are highly amoral
and mostly indifferent to mankind;
the major action centers about the
great war between the elves of
(Danish) Britain and an invasion
from the troll kingdoms of Scan-
dinavia. Other mythologies are
cleverly worked in, including a
chapter set among the tuatha of
Ireland.
This was the first of Anderson’s
wonderful fantasies of faerie (Three
Hearts and Three Lions, The Mer-
man’s Children, et al.). And though
it’s a comparatively short novel it
manages, unlike the fantasies com-
plained of above, to suggest the
epic with the sense of a whole world
of faerie operating in and around
that of man. The Broken Sword
ON BOOKS
189
might well be considered the first
great modem American fantasy.
Shoptalk
First, supplementary informa-
tion for a review published some
months back. I’ve received a letter
from Advent Publishers bemoan-
ing the fact that I simply listed the
publisher of James Blish’s The
Tale That Wags the God as "Ad-
vent” and quite right they are,
since there is another Advent that
publishes books. So for the record,
the publisher of the Blish volume
is Advent: Publishers, Inc. of PO
Box A3228, Chicago, IL 60690. I
excuse myself from accusations of
sloppiness with the feeble out that
this Advent has been bravely pub-
lishing books on SF for so long that
I assumed everyone would know
who I was talking about.
Sequels and series dept. . . . Part
Two of The Malloreon by David
Eddings is available: The King of
Murgos (Del Rey, $16.95) . . . The
much-needed sequel to Orson Scott
Card’s Seventh Son has appeared.
Red Prophet takes place in the
same wonderfully conceived alter-
nate United States of nearly two
centuries ago, where the supersti-
tions and hexes of our pioneering
ancestors are a working system of
magic (Tor, $17.95) . . . Warlord of
Antares by A. Nonymous is (gasp)
#37 in the Dray Prescot series and
the fourth and last of the interior
cycle, the "Witch War Saga” (DAW,
$3.50, paper).
You can have some fun with the
cover of The Best of Marion Zimmer
Bradley by trying to identify the
SF people portrayed on the multi-
character cover. Don’t ask me ... I
only got a couple of them. (DAW,
$3.95, paper).
As I point out periodically, po-
etry is a whole different ball game
from prose, and I don’t feel quali-
fied to judge it in any way. How-
ever, that art should by all means
be encouraged, particularly in the
genres of SF and fantasy which
need all the esthetic sensibilities
they can get these days. So for
those interested, a listing of var-
ious manifestations of the poetic
muse relating to science fiction and
fantasy received over the past few
months: Force Fields by Andrew
Joron (Starmont House, $16.95
cloth, $8.95 paper)-, Perception Bar-
riers by Robert Frazier (Berkeley
Poets Workshop & Press, PO Box
459, Berkeley, CA 94701, $5.95,
paper); The Archer In the Marrow:
The Applewood Cycles 1967-1987
by Peter Viereck, a novel-length
poem whose subject matter could
be of interest to readers of SF and
fantasy (one chapter appeared in
the Rhy sling Anthology of the best
SF poetry of 1985) (W. W. Norton,
$14.95 cloth, $6.95 paper); and a
very handsome boxed edition of
five of Bruce Boston’s books, ap-
propriately entitled The Bruce
Boston Omnibus (Ocean View
Books, Box 4148, Mountain View,
CA 94040, $12.95).
And as for prose from the small
presses, there’s Discovering H. P.
Lovecraft, edited by Darrell
Schweitzer, consisting of various
190
BAIRD SEARLES
articles of literary criticism on HPL
(including one titled "Lovecraft’s
Ladies” which could be a candidate
for the shortest article on record;
I’m hard put to think of any off
hand). The volume is #6 of the
Starmont Studies In Literary Crit-
icism (Starmont House, $19.95
cloth, $9.95 paper).
C. S. Lewis’s famous The Screw-
tape Letters has been reprinted in
paperback. It consists of a series of
avuncular letters from Screwtape,
a rather jovial devil, to his nephew.
Wormwood (NAL, $2.95, paper).
Books to be considered for review
in this column should be submitted
to Baird Searles, Suite 133, 380
Bleecker St., New York, New York
10014 •
NEXT ISSUE
We have a special treat for you next month, as Nebula-\winner
Lucius Shepard returns with our September cover story, "The Scale-
hunter’s Beautiful Daughter.” This is a prequel of sorts to Shepard’s
renowned story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” one
of 1984’s most popular and talked-about stories. Like the earlier
story, this one takes place in a land dominated by the immobile
but still-living body of an immense, mountain-huge dragon, en-
chanted into stillness in some sorcerous battle in the unimaginably
distant past, so long ago that forests and villages have sprung up
on the dragon's mountainous flanks. “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful
Daughter” takes us inside the great dragon, inside Griaule itself, to
explore a whole new world of enchantment and brutality, terror
and wonder, strange dangers and stranger beauties. You won’t
want to miss this one; Shepard at his evocative best. Ian Watson
is also on hand for September, with a vivid and hard-hitting
novella — jammed, as Watson’s stuff usually is, with bizarre and in-
novative new ideas — about visiting aliens who turn out to be a
whole lot more than just tourists, in “The Flies of Memory,” one Qf
Watson’s most challenging and exciting pieces ever.
ALSO IN SEPTEMBER: Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a thought-
ful, intensely-rendered study of a boy’s difficult coming-of-age in
a future Boston caught in the grip of a deadly Ice Age, in the pow-
erful “Glacier”; the gonzo Neai Barrett, Jr. treats us to a story that’s
strange even by his standards, a look into the weird and wonderful
world of “Stairs,” a place unlike ony place you’ve ever been before;
Lisa Goidstein gives us an unsettling look into an odd sort of afterlife,
in “Death is Different”; and Richard Muelier returns to these pages
after a long absence, taking us sideways in time to an alternate
America for some vivid and scary “Meditations on the Death of
Cortes.” Plus an array of columns and features. Look for our Sep-
tember issue on sale on your newsstands on July 26, 1988.
ON BOOKS
191
CONVENTIONAL
CALENDAR
by Erwin S. Strauss
The European con season’s coming up. Plan now for social weekends
with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For a longer,
later list, an explanation of cons, & a sample of SF folksongs, send me an
SASE (addressed, stamped #10 (business) envelope) at 4271 Duke St.
#D-10, Alexandria VA 22304. The hot line is (703) 823-3117. If a machine
answers, leave your area code & number. I'll call back on my nickel. Early
evening’s often a good time to phone cons (many phones are homes). For
free listings, tell me about your con 6 months ahead. When writing cons,
enclose an SASE. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge.
JUNE, 1988
24-26 — Fantasy Fair. For into, write: 482 Gardner Rd., Stockbridge GA 30281. Or caii: (404) 961-2347
(10 am to 10 pm, not coiled). Con will be held in: Atlanta GA (it city omitted, same as in address) at the
Hilton & Towers downtown. Guests will include: David (Sundiver) Brin. 5000 expected. Comics/media
oriented, but there’s nothing much else announced tor this weekend at press time.
24-26 — MidWestCon. (513) 631-2543 or 984-1447. Cincinnati OH. Traditional old-timers' relaxacon.
30-July 3 — SF Research Assn., % Mead, 6300 Ocean Dr., Carpus Christi TX 78412. Academic meet.
JULY, 1988
1-4 — WesterCon. (602) 839-2543. Phoenix AZ. Robert Silverberg, Craig Miller. West's big annual do.
8-10— Archon, Box 50125, Clayton MO 63105. (618) 337-9181, (314) 524-6399. St. Louis MO. Yarbro.
8-10 — LlbertyCon, Box 695, Hixson TN 37343. Sheraton, Chattanooga TN. Dickson, Tucker, Lindahns.
22-24 — UniCon, Box 7553, Silver Spring MD 20907. Holiday Inn, Annapolis MD. V. (Peace War) Vinge.
22-24 — Conversion, Box 1088, Stn. M, Calgary AB T2P 2K9. (403) 242-1807. Silverberg, Ed Bryant.
29-31— PhroliCon, 652 Van Kirk, Philadelphia PA 19120. The relaxacon done by the PhilCon people.
29-31 — RiverCon, Box 58009, Louisville KY 40258. (502) 449-6562. Holiday Inn. 900 expected.
29-31 — Ditto, % Glicksohn, 508 Windermere Ave., Toronto ON M6S 3L6. Like Cortlu, tor tanzine ten.
29-Aug. 1 — MapleCon, Box 3156, Stn. 0, Ottawa ON KIP 6H7. (613) 741-3162. Clement. Media con.
29-Aug. 1 — MythCon, 90 Camino Real, Berkeley CA 94705. (415) 658-6033 LeGuin. High tantasy.
AUGUST, 1988
5-7 — Conine, % Ivan Towlson, New College, Oxford 0X1 3BN, UK. Terry Pratchett. Oxtord Poly campus.
5-7 — OmaCon, 2709 Everett, Lincoln NE 68502. At the Holiday Inn Central. No guests announced yet.
SEPTEMBER, 1988
1-5 — NoLaCon II, 921 Canal #831, New Orleans LA 70112. (504) 525-6008. WorldCon. S70to 7/14/88.
AUGUST, 1989
31 -Sep. 4 — Nareascon3, Box 46, MITPO, Cambridge MA 02139. WorldCon in Boston. $60 to 7/15/88.
AUGUST, 1990
23-27 — ConFiction, % Box 1252, BGS, New York, NY 10274. The Hague, Holland. WorldCon. Haldeman.
$60 to 12/1/88.
28-Sep. 1 — ConOiego, Box 15471, San Diego CA 92115. (619) 265-0903. NASFiC. $35 at last word.
fake any 5 books for
^ with membership ^
SEE OTHER SIDE FOR ADDITIONAL SELECTIONS.
THE^
TALES
HiRldKllN
1362 Pub. ed S1495
Clubed.S5.98
f^FCHXSMOnS
HihKiD.W
■BH
5132 Pub. ed. $17.95 5124 Pub. ed. $15.95
Clubed $698 Clubed.$4.98
L *5140 Pub ed. $16.95 3939 Pub. ed. $17.95
Clubed. $5.98 Clubed $5.98
0075 The First 5
Novels. 2 vols.
Comb pub. ed
$32 30
Clubed $8.98
mAGOWttOpS
PERN«Su/««''
m
2543 Oragonfljghl:
DragonquesI: The
While Dragon.
Comb pub. ed
$2685
Clubed $798
How the Club works: You'll receive your 5 books
for only $1 (plus^hipping and handling) after your
application for membership is accepted. We reserve
the right to reject any application. However, once
accepted as a member, you may examine the books in
your home and, if not completely satisfied, return them
within 10 days at Club expense. Your membership will
be canceled and you'll owe nothing.
About every 4 weeks (14 times a year), we'll send
you the Club's bulletin. Things to Come, describing 2
coming Selections and a variety of Alternate choices.
In addition, up to 4 times a year you may receive offers
of special Selections, always at low Club prices. If you
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I want the best SF in or out of this world! Please
accept my application for membership in The Science
fiction Book Ciub. Send me the' 5 books I have num-
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described in this ad. I will take 4 more books at regular
low Club prices during the coming year and may
resign anytime thereafter. SFBC offers serious works
for mature readers.
3871 Includes The 5116 Includes Five 0752 Elric ol 1172 The Vanishing
SilenI Tower and IWelflhs of Heaven; Melnibone; The Tower; The Bane
The Silicon Mage. Silence in Sailor on the Seas ol the Black Sword;
Spec.ed ▲ Solitude; The ol Fate; The Weird Stormbringec
Club ed. $750 Empress of Earth, ol the While Wolf. Spec, ed ▲
Spec. ed. ▲ Spec. ed. ▲ Clubed $7.98
Clubed. $8.98 Clubed. $6.98
provided and return it to us by the date specified.
We allow you at least 10 days for making your
decision. If you do not receive the form in time to
respond within 10 days and receive an unwanted
Selection, you may return it at our expense.
As a member you need buy only 4 books at regular
low Club prices during the coming year. You may resign
anytime thereafter or continue to enjoy Club benefits
for as long as you wish. One of the 2 Selections each
month is always only $4.98. Other Selections are
higher, but always much less than hardcover pub-
lishers' editions-UP TO 65% OFFThe Club offers more
than 400 books to choose from. Each volume printed
on our special presses is produced on high-quality
acid-free paper. A shipping and handling charge is
added to all shipments. Send no money now, but do
mail the coupon today!
*Expilcil scsnes and/or language may be oflensive to some
Ms.
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If under 18. parent must sign
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The Science Fiction Book Club offers its own complete
hardbound editions sometimes altered in size to bt
special presses and save you even more. Members
accepted in U.S.A. and Canada only. Canadian
members will be serviced from Canada. Offer slightly
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0
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U we!
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where the tar, far lulure is already a memory. . . and the distant
past is our present. Join The Science Fiction Book Club today
—and have the times oiyour Hie!
5355 Pub e<3 $1795
Club eti S4 98
f 5249 Spec ea a
C lubed $6.98
• 3236 Pub ed $1995
Chjbed $996
4002 Pub ed $1995
Club ed. $696
43S6Pub.ed $1995
Clubed $696
/ rj
WILLOW
WAYLAND
DREW
It $$30 Spec ed a
C lubed $598
/ 7 \
4259 Spec ed a
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Crystal Memory
4028 Spec ed a
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4218 Startide
Riling: The Uplift
War. Spec ed a
Clubed $998
1420 Includes Ihe
PIrsl. Second and
Third Books.
Spec ed a
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* 5223 Two 2-in-1 vols.
Includes Roma Mater:
Galllcenae; Oahut;
The Dog and Ihe
Wolf. Spec ed a
Ckjbed $1495
• 3731 Night's
Master: Death's
Master: Delusion's
Master.
Spec ed a
Clubed $898
Avar^an
Rising
Judith Tarr
• 3715 Delirium's
Mistress: Night's
Sorceries
Spec, ed a
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*5322 Includes The
Hall oMhe
Mountain King. The
Lady of Han-Gilen:
A Fall ol Princes
Comb putied
$51^5
Clubed $998
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A Eiclusrve hardcover edition t Copyright © 1987 Paramount Pictures Corporation All Rights Reserved
*Eiplicit scenes and/or language may be oNensive to some STAR TREK Is A Registered Trademark 01 Paramount Pictures Corporation
ttTM& c 1988 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LHI
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